The 7 principles of SEIS

On 1st of February 2008, the Commission adopted a Communication on SEIS. In it the principles that SEIS will be based on are described as follows:
1. Information should be managed as close as possible to its source;
2. Information should be collected once, and shared with others for many purposes;
3. Information should be readily available to public authorities and enable them to easily fulfill their legal reporting obligations;
4. Information should be readily accessible to end-users, primarily public authorities at all levels from local to European, to enable them to assess in a timely fashion the state of the environment and the effectiveness of their policies, and to design new policy;
5. Information should also be accessible to enable end-users, both public authorities and citizens, to make comparisons at the appropriate geographical scale (e.g. countries, cities, catchment areas) and to participate meaningfully in the development and implementation of environmental policy;
6. Information should be fully available to the general public, after due consideration of the appropriate level of aggregation and subject to appropriate confidentiality constraints, and at national level in the relevant national language(s); and
7. Information sharing and processing should be supported through common, free open source software tools.