1. Introduction: The Environmental Question
and Sustainable Development

For its gravity and extension, the question of the environment calls for the general involvement of politicians and administrators, but also and especially it calls for a new sensitivity and awareness in the private citizen who should gradually become the subject of radical modifications in attitudes and living habits. An efficient environmental protection, however, must not only be pervasive; it must also be as articulated and preventive as possible. The role of information and therefore of the tools and informatic techniques connected with it thus proves central in its function of support of the strategies and decisions of politicians, on one hand, and in orienting public opinion and providing research objectives, on the other.
Our generation but even more so those of the future will have to confront and solve a series of environmental problems which, though occurring in specific places, have the characteristic of provoking consequences on a planetary level. Among these, we need only mention the greenhouse effect, reduction of the ozone layer, acid rains, reduction of biological diversity, soil consumption, hydro-geological problems, air and water pollution and, finally, the exponential increase of waste materials. Today, the main issue facing all humanity, without geographical or political distinctions, is the safeguarding of nature, the protection of the environment in which the life of man and of all living beings unfolds and develops. No legal system can shirk its responsibility to acknowledge and protect the "right to the environment" as a "fundamental human right," one that is irreducible and unalienable, belonging to every person, without borders or limitations.

This therefore poses an enormous challenge. A challenge indeed so great that it suggests the inevitability of a radical change in course towards "an economical and social balance requiring not one, but five revolutions." Firstly, there has to be an energy revolution utilising alternative energies such as solar energy. Then a technological revolution to enable recycling of the materials employed; then an economic revolution with a formidable transfer of resources and technologies from rich countries to poor countries, from the North to the South of the globe. The fourth revolution must be political in the sense of gaining awareness of the need to surpass the logic of nationalistic politics to solve environmental problems which instead can only be confronted in an international dimension. Finally, a moral revolution will have to be promoted to arouse awareness of the impossibility of unlimited growth: responsible development is only possible through an ethically motivated self-control.

These ideas are fortunately becoming widespread opinions given that "environmental risks are not considered as such solely in reference to the exploitation of natural resources by man and humanity of today. They are also meant in the sense of responsibility towards nature itself, considered as having inviolable rights. Nor can we leave out of consideration the right of future generations to enjoy the same goods we use today. This sense of responsibility must constitute a value in and of itself, independently from all opportunism.

It is therefore clear to all that it is not possible to organically confront the problems of the environment, conduct effective interventions to correct situations of decay, significantly reduce the aggression of production activities and finally, to exert a proper control on the overall environmental situation without, at the same time, considering the long-term needs to safeguard the environment and the objectives for economic development. Economic development and protection of the environment can not be assumed as antithetical objectives, thus reducing the complexity of the environmental question to the extreme of a "mere ideological conflict between industrialism and ecologism."

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (U.N.C.E.D.), held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, proposed a philosophy tending to integrate the many aspects of the environmental issue. On this occasion, the participants formulated a series of proposals for the forthcoming century, giving birth to the so-called Agenda XXI. The objective is to promote a "sustainable development," defined starting from the report by the world commission on the environment and development of 1987 as "a development that deals with the needs of the present without jeopardising the capacity of future generations to satisfy their needs".

The realisation of a sustainable development is based on the acknowledgement of three fundamental priorities:
a) introducing and integrating the environmental issue on every level of government, from central to local;
b) defining a model of planning, management and control of the territory;
c) the information and participation of all subjects involved and first among these, the citizen by means of a broad and effective access to the information pertinent to the environment; participation and information are the necessary conditions for bringing about a modern environmental policy, the effective expression of the moral revolution to which we referred earlier.

2. Diffusion of Information on the Environment and the European Union

A growing need for information on the environment is felt by a growing number of public authorities and institutional organs (on international, community, national, regional and local levels), as well as by individuals and groups of individuals, up to and including all of public opinion, whose sensitivity and responsibility must be aroused for a far-reaching and efficient protection of the environment. While on one hand, the collectivity expects scientists and researchers to seek greater knowledge of environmental phenomena and to develop technologies capable of affirming control, it is then the task of legal and economic operators to concretely deal with applying the new norms and methods, verifying the results in social relations, as productive and economic processes. Likely, while it is the task of politicians and public administrators to make laws dealing with planning and organising the territorial lay-out, it is then the task of legal operators and among these, judges in particular to confront and solve the many and complex problems which derive from applying often uncoordinated and ambiguous laws.

With reference to the environment, information technologies are useful in various functions which range from analysing and controlling environmental phenomena to planning and developing production processes that are less aggressive and polluting. The main sectors of application are environmental monitoring (surveying, collecting, filing and processing data relative to atmospheric, hydric and acoustic pollution, climatic conditions, level of radioactivity and the evolution of environmental parameters, etc.), the development of numerical models to represent natural phenomena, creation of territorial information systems, building databases on various levels (international, national, region, local) and content (information on environmental data, documentation and research centres, new competences and technologies available, legislation, pertinent case-law and jurisprudence).

As for the need to make information on the environment available to a group of users who are very diversified for culture, preparation, functions and responsibility, but in any event generally without specific informatic competence, very important today is the role played by all the most recent technologies which for the most part based on the use of natural (or semi-natural) languages, graphic tools, hypertextual and hypermedial techniques prove more or less directly oriented towards creating particularly simple and friendly man-machine interfaces. The European Union has posed the freedom of access to information on the environment as one of its main objectives. Indeed, as early as 1973, the first Programme to take action on the environmental question recognised this priority which has been since explicitly reconfirmed in all the Programmes to follow, including the latest which, on this topic, contains very important affirmations.

The general implications of a legal order do not only concern the right to information on the environment; they extend to a vast series of conceptual categories and traditional institutions. Emblematic for all is the consideration that in our legal tradition, based on Roman Law, the environment and its elements such as water and air were not considered as possessions in the legal sense, but instead as res communes omnium, and therefore neither appropriable nor susceptible to exclusive enjoyment. The recognition of the environments limited and exhaustible nature, and hence of the risks of its being damaged or compromised, has posed the need to revise the legal categories, qualifying these elements as genuine legal possessions with a calculable economic value.

In addition to defining more appropriate legal categories, the emergence of the environmental issue has led to the search from new models of administrative activity, the development of new rights (such as the rights to information and to participating in environmental decisions), as well as singling out and exploiting technologically advanced tools, such as informatic tools, capable of rendering the new rights formulated effective and useable.

3. The Contribution of the Istituto per la Documentazione Giuridica del CNR in the Field of Environmental Information and the ELIOS Telematic Observatory

The creation of the ELIOS Telematic Observatory comes at the end of a historic-cultural and scientific itinerary which has developed concurrently to the most significant stages in the development of legal documentation and information in an area of great complexity and certain social importance as is that of environmental law.

Starting from the premise of the environment as a social question, planetary on one hand and national on the other, we must then consider the particularly delicate but central role played by the Public Administration which is called to globally modernise and overhaul its relations with the citizen. Along with the citizens legally recognised right to information on the environment, attempts must be made gradually and as unambiguously as possible to form a general picture of the main legal-environmental information systems that are materially useable nationally and internationally.

The ELIOS Telematic Observatory is part of the many research activities that the "Istituto per la documentazione giuridica" has devoted to legal-environmental informatics, not only of the strictly documentary type. Of these, let us recall the BIGA and DAUE archives, the HYPERLAW hypertextual system, the system for information retrieval in the environmental question called CABALA and the SEDAM and ELP expert systems.

BIGA (Bibliografia Giuridica dellAmbiente) is a database containing bibliographical references relative to Italian legal literature on the topic of the environment and law; it can be consulted on paper, CD-ROM and on line on the Internet.

The DAUE archive (Direttive Ambientali dellUnione Europea), also distributed on the international network, specifically pertains to the state of execution of the Community Directives on the topic of environment within the Italian legal system.

HYPERLAW takes on the form of a hypertextual type database on the topic of acoustic pollution, while the C.A.BA.L.A. project (Consultazione Assistita di Basi di dati su Leggi Ambientali) consists of a true expert system for information retrieval in which the techniques of Artificial Intelligence are utilised to configure, on the basis of the users needs for information, the modalities for query formulation and its specific contents.

It is more appropriate to class S.E.D.AM. (Sistema Esperto in Diritto Ambientale) and E.L.P. (Environment Legal Protection) Advisor as integrated intelligent systems. The former provides a form of assisted consultance on the topic of emissions by combustion systems, while the competence of the latter unfolds with reference to problems connected with the protection of natural beauties. By means of a guided dialogue between user and machine, the E.L.P. Advisor enables a typologically differentiated series of linguistic and conceptual connections between the decisional module and the documentary module (formed by a plurality of specialist legal databases that can be interrogated directly by the user, or by means of automatically extracting the describers selected within the dialogue itself).

Finally, on the basis of the experience matured at the "Istituto per la documentazione giuridica," the ideal configuration has been hypothesised of an integrated information system model in which the various functions contained in its general design of operation would correspond to specific techniques and tools, assumed in a new and different utility deriving from the synergy between operating connection and unambiguousness of orientation. In this framework, we feel special attention should be devoted to employing widely used telematic tools which would make it possible to group and organically present great masses of specialist information, pertaining to a theme of such topical interest and importance as the environmental question.

4. Homepage

ELIOS Environmental Legal Information Observatory System (idg.fi.cnr.it/guide/elios) forms a collection of URLs pertinent to the Web sites of the thematic area resulting from the combination of Informatics, Law and Environment.

The flexibility of the tool employed has made it possible to constitute a series of Indexes on the electronic page, capable of facilitating the retrieval of the information of interest. At present, the two main Indexes on line Index by Name (Names) and Index by Country (Geo-List) - both constituing the Sites section index - enable the identification of Web sites, the first, on the basis of the acronym or abbreviation by which it is known (and the full name resulting from the former), the second in relation to the geographic area.

Many other indexes more over described complete this vortal (vertical portal) web site aiming to offer an exhaustive routing system for the retrieval of environmental legal information on the Net. Re-designed on the basis of advanced usable rules ELIOS is made-up of an internal searh-engine, alphabetical and thematical indexes, map, documents and link collection so to help in several different ways the end-user both to browse within ELIOS and retrieve the desired url or document.
Particular attention has also being paid in re-designing a complete accessible interface by means of the well known W3C standard css2 (see also: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/).

Thanks to the style sheet editing method ELIOS web site appears in three different ways according a common browser, a special browser or a printing machine ask for a document within ELIOS. As a result, any kinds of end user can "see" ELIOs in a proper way even in the case - as for example - of a blind people using a special browser supported by screen-reader; at the same time the printing procedure of ELIOS takes advantage of a specific output rule. ELIOS takes into account not only the international WS3c standards but also the recently enacted Italian rule of the Auhtority for Informatics in the Public Administration (AIPA) concerning the right of access to web sites (see also: governo.it/sez_dossier/linee_web/circ13mar2001_fp.html).

One of the carachteristics of ELIOS to be outlined is not only the huge amount of links specifically oriented to the environmental legal field but also - in many cases - the possibility offered by related records to describe the Internet resource in a way similar to RDF standard (see also: http://dublincore.org/schemas/dcmes-xml-20000714.dtd).

The Home index is made up of the staff description, the contact-mail of the manager of the ELIOS project, the link to the IDG site, this same Presentation and of the reviews spread all over the Net of the ELIOS site.

4.1. Search

Search function is presently carried out by a free Internet service named FreeFind. It is possible to take advantage of logic operators AND (= Match ALL) and OR (= Match ANY). Each time the data of the ELIOS Observatory are updated, a new indexing is made by the search engine.

4.2. Map

By the Map tool it is possible to locate one's browsing within ELIOS Site in a proper way. A semantic interactive map is going to replace the present textual one.

4.3. Feedback

A Form has been created for sending observations or suggestions specifically related to the Observatory. The Form can be used also for suggesting the introduction of a site into ELIOS' Observatory by sending the Url and a brief site description.

4.4. Links

A huge collection of links relating Public Bodies, Universities, Research Bodies and ITLaw Institutes is reported in this section. Particular attention has been paid on this last section where bilingual resource description forms - both in Italian and English language - provide the end user an effective overview of the Legal Informatics research presently carried out worldwide.

4.5. Sites

The Sites Index is made-up of an Name/Acro- and of a Geo-List. Index by Name (Name/Acro List): in addition to the acronyms, abbreviations and corresponding full names, the Index by Name contains the addresses (URLs Uniform Resource Locators) of more than two hundred and fifty Web sites concerning: a) organisations (public and private) for environmental information, instruction and education: agencies, institutes, centres, laboratories, committees, commissions, consortia, companies, associations, institutions; b) information resources available on telematic networks: electronic archives, databanks and databases, directories, meta-indexes, catalogues, lists of sites in turn related to organisations or information resources on the topic of the environment and environmental law, networks, systems and services for the management and diffusion of information on the environment, services for environmental observation and monitoring, c) organs of international co-operation, ministries, departments, commissions, committees, councils, groups international, regional and national agencies, non-government organisations, programmes and projects for environmental protection, sustainable development and environmental politics; d) registers for ecological modelling and cataloguing, consultance services for strategic planning and solving of conflicts pertaining to the maintenance of ecological equilibria and the attainment of sustainable development; e) publications, electronic periodicals and reviews, libraries, bibliographies, dictionaries, thesauri, glossaries, international organs for co-operation in developing and standardising geographical, environmental and legal-environmental terminology.

Index by Country (Geo-List): in the version presently on line, the Index by Country contains the names and addresses relative to Web sites of legal-environmental interest, distributed over thirty-five countries, geographic Areas and international Organisations: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Portugal, ex Soviet Union, Hungary, Spain, United States of America, Sweden, North America, Central America, Latin America, South Africa, European Union and United Nations Organisation.

4.6. Sources

The user can target searches on the basis of the different document typologies by selecting the site of interest to him from the groupings respectively designated with the terms "Documents, Treaties and Conventions" and "Directories, Meta-databases and Indexes."

The first grouping contains the addresses of the Web sites where it is possible to consult the integral text of several of the main documents (agreements, conventions, international treaties) principally concerning human right with respect to the environment, various world ecological problems (pollution, desertification, acid rains, climatic changes, reduction of biodiversity, species risking extinction, etc.), and the legislative interventions and economic politics aimed at promoting a sustainable development.

The approximately fifty sites of the second grouping in reality represent a considerable expansion and therefore, also a useful integration of the listings contained in the Telematic Observatory illustrated herein. Indeed, they are in turn formed by Guides to on-line information resources, pertinent Links of Indexes and Lists, second-level Databases (Meta-databases), Directories and Gophers which make it possible to access Internet resources on environmental and legal-environmental topics, presenting them in the form of menus organised into a hierarchical structure (the single entries contain connections to other documents, search engines or information services).

4.7. Organizations

A new index is introduced to outline all those organizations - national and in particular international ones - all over the world that are specifically involved in the environmental legal field.

4.8. Topics

At present, the search by topics is possible by means of the first systematic structuring of the subject which is expressed in the listings Education, Terminology and Standardisation. These respectively pertain to the problems of environmental information, instruction and education, those of the undertakings (national and international) aimed at normalising the terminology of this specialist sector and finally, those of initiatives to standardise geographical information, documentation, indexes, technologies and environmental systems. Users who do not possess the latest generation browsers (capable of visualising frames structures on the Internet) can consult the Observatory by activating a specific option (No Frame) which enables them to visualise the data of their interest.

Let us again draw attention to the fact that the formal analysis and structuring of the different types of legal data to be organised, clearly evidence the great lack of homogeneity today existent between different information systems with respect to configuration and treatment of data belonging to identical typologies.

The examples of this total lack of homogeneity in formally presenting data by private undertakings as well as by public organs, could be very numerous. Let it suffice here to briefly note the general lack of co-ordination which, in this aspect too, and not only in our Country, characterises the initiatives for the diffusion of environmental and legal-environmental information on line. On the international level and in the specific sector of environmental law, very recently an important initiative in this sense has been undertaken, aimed at elaborating and diffusing precise standards for drafting, distributing and localising specialist, typified and therefore formally homogeneous information. In December 1996, on invitation of United States Vice-President Al Gore, at a meeting of the Global Information Society, organised by the representatives of the G7 countries and by the European Commission, an agreement was reached on the standards of environmental information capable of founding a "virtual library of environmental data and information," accessible on global networks. There followed, in July 1997 in St. Petersburg, a Convention for the development and adoption of new models to organise and integrate environmental information throughout the world, promoted by INENCO (Centre for International Environmental Co-operation).

4.9. Net Tools

Interaction with the information base collected in the ELIOS Telematic Observatory, in relation to the different specialist themes treated and to their respective scholars, is provided for by the numerous addresses (approximately one hundred) grouped into three Lists of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems information systems consultable on line by means of Telnet sessions), Mailing Lists, News Groups and Search Engines. These facilitate the retrieval of information by means of an exhaustive directory of specific search-engines and the exchange of messages between network users interested in specific problems contained in the vast legal-environmental topic.

5. Conclusions and Perspectives

In just over a year since its appearance on the net, the ELIOS Telematic Observatory has been indicated, with particularly positive evaluations, on the principal European and American Internet sites. Among these: Universität Salzburg (AU), T.M.C. Asser Institut (NL; Research Institute in the field of international and European law), University of Groningen (NL), Universiteit Utrecht (NL), National Centre for Legal Education (UK), University of Exeter (UK), European Environmental Law Home Page (EU), Cornell Law School (USA), Utah State University (USA), Washington Law School (USA), Western Connecticut State University (USA), Catalaw (USA, an on-line legal information catalogue, organised by topic and country), Wash Law Web, HIEROS GAMOS (USA), ENEA (Ente per le Nuove technologie, lEnergia e lAmbiente), Università degli studi di Camerino, ADG (Associazione per la Documentazione Giuridica), Architects Association of Rome and Province, the electronic archives of the Public Prosecutors Office at the Magistrates Court of Venice.

Developments in the undertaking are mainly aimed in the direction of a more complete systematic articulation of the topic, tending towards the creation of a sort of hypertextual manual which is "dynamic" (for the automatism of updating connected sites) and "interactive" (for the possibility offered the user to dialogue with the document system and thus actively contribute to its revising and integrating).

Another aspect of the Observatory on which we are already working is the documentary analysis of the collected sites: it will shortly be possible, by clicking on the icon situated alongside the name of each site, to visualise an accurate presentation and description outline, containing not only the basic identification data (Type, URL, Name, Author, Country, Language), but also the description, indexing and classification (Description, Keywords, Classification Code) of the site itself. Based on this new structuring of collected data, it will thus be possible to target searches on the sites, passing through the outline analysis filter before launching the network connection with the respective addresses.

We feel it important to note at this point that the more the jurist with an open-minded spirit and a critical sense of responsibility is capable of receiving the modern tools offered by the evolution of informatics technology, the greater the possible beneficial results to the world of law, not only on the level of operations and realisation of procedures, but also on the level of further visits and elaborations of the same conceptual structures produced by a long and solid tradition.

Evolved information systems such as those presented herein can surely constitute a valid help for a better application of laws, positively influencing the various phases of the total legal process from the creation and drafting of the norm to the verification of its effective force, from the interpretation of the single legal text to the overall recognition of the legal systems coherence and completeness thus contributing to dispelling the citizens age-old mistrust of public authority, a mistrust also proven in memorable pages of literature. Particularly in the environmental area where, for the characteristics of the relative information, the use of informatic tools appears essential, not only to properly perform the necessary functions of the documentary, management and decisional type, but also and especially to guarantee the citizen the concrete possibilities to exert his fundamental right to information.