Multidimensional access to European environmental data

Catalogues have been an indispensable tool to locate books in libraries for centuries. Their equivalent in our networked world are catalogue systems which facilitate search and retrieval especially on the Web. We explore the requirements and their technical solutions to support search and retrieval according to multiple dimensions in Web based catalogue systems. We show how components that address individual dimensions can also be combined to tackle multidimensional queries. Several European environmental catalogue systems that we have been involved in are used as examples to illustrate the approach which can easily be transferred to further application e.g., e-commerce.