Environmental applications share common features that make them distinct from typical applications of other areas of applied computer science. This fact has lead during the last years to the development of Environmental Informatics, a novel specialty of Applied Informatics, which studies specific problems related with the application of computer science techniques in environmental problems. In environmental applications often many different, non homogeneous information sources can be found, such as text data e.g. environmental legislation or research projects results, measurement data from monitoring networks, structural data on chemical substances, satellite data etc. In particular, environmental data is often geographically coded, i.e. information is attached to a particular point or region in space. Secondly, some of the data objects are multidimensional and have to be represented by means of complex geometric objects (polygons or curves).
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