19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability

An integrated website for the management and the exploitation of a research project

Flavio Fontana (fontana@casaccia.enea.it), Anna Moreno (anna.moreno@casaccia.enea.it), and Paolo Masoni (masoni@bologna.enea.it)
ENEA, Italy

The European Commission has financed a thematic network named CASCADE (Co-operation and Standard for Life Cycle Assessment Data in Europe) whose web site is the following: http://192.107.71.126/cascade

The complex structure of the “CASCADE Web Site“ is distributed and its  functions    are in relation to both the Life cycle Assessment (LCA) theme and the new information and communication technologies. The CASCADE web site goals are to create a new LCA information market and to offer new software products that are interoperable  and compliant with emerging standards;  at the same time, the services of the web site assure  flexibility  in  responding to the user requirements.

The CASCADE web site has three networks:

• Internet with institutional and product communication,  public relations and services;
• Intranet for internal communication and collaborative work which is reserved for the Cascade Partners.
• Extranet for communication and services, knowledge integration and data exchange

Cascade Web Site is an information service and offers easy access to the results of the project through a WEB based document management system.

Cascade Web Site provides multimedia showcases of LCA results which are  arranged  with an user friendly interface to have as  easy  as  possible access for the general public, the  scientific and the business community.

The complete list of the services provided by the three networks are: Project information; Project documentation (Doc. Repository, Project Results); General Information; News (Events, Meetings, etc.); Multimedia Information (Interviews, Trailers, Flash Demos);   Virtual Meetings & Seminars; Target Groups  (User registration, Users Groups, FAQs, Forum); Technical Services (FTP Secure Server, DB Visual Interface,  Utilities &Tools); Distance Learning (ODL) and Terminology Repository;  Links.

In particular it has been put a lot of effort on the Development of training packages to make sure that also people outside of the CASCADE network can take advantage of the project results. The main subjects are:

Introductory course on LCA; Simplified LCA methodology; Usage of data formats based on the STEP model; Data dictionaries relevant to LCA; Recording and re-use of LCA data for products; Quality assessment of LCA data.