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NATURNET PORT – NEW SOLUTION FOR E-LEARNING AND M-LEARNING IN SUSTAINABLEDEVELOPMENT BASED ON INTEROPERABLE WEB SERVICESKarel Charvat 1 , Petr Horak 1 , Peter Barz 2, Harald Stelzl 3 , Alexander Almer 3 , Markus Jochum 4 , Maris Alberts 51 Czech Centrum for Science and Society, Praha 150 00 Czech Republic2 Environmental Network, Aboyne AB34 4TJ, Scotland, UK.3 Joanneum Research – Institute of Digital Image Processing, Graz A-8010, Austria4 Ludwigs Albert University, Freiburg 79085, Germany5 Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, Riga LV-1459, LatviaKEYWORDSSustainable development knowledge management,elearning, qualitative reasoning, metadata, thesaurus.ABSTRACTNaturNet-Redime develops educational programmestowards implementing the European Union’s Strategy forSustainable Development (SSD). The prototypetechnology produced demonstrates the utility of ourapproach for developing educational programmes thatincreases understanding of sustainable development andthe tools used to make decisions that affect sustainabledevelopment. Example content stresses awareness ofenvironmental, economic, and social factors. Asrecognized by the SSD, this increased understanding willallow more informed and equitable decisions to be madeby increasing public involvement in the decision-makingprocess. All educational; materials of the project will beavailable via the NaturNet-Redime web portal, whereusers will find appropriate learning objects to lead themthrough the learning process. Interaction with end usersthroughout the project provides feedback to the projectpartners to ensure that the tools are optimised.INTRODUCTIONThe main concept of Sustainable Development (SD)is development that meets the needs of the presentwithout compromising the ability of future generations tomeet their own needs (United Nations, 1987). SD thusaims to balance the effects of the interactingenvironmental, social, and economic systems. TheEuropean Strategy for SD tries to distribute and inculcatethe concept of SD and supports particularly electronicmedia such as the Internet that offer new ways oflearning to promote better understanding of thosedependencies among citizens. Existing SD informationresources on the Internet focus from the local to thenational, supra-national and global levels and arecharacterized by their sheer quantity – a search for theterms “sustainability” and “sustainable development”alone generates several million resources on the Internet.With sub-topics such as SD in agriculture, forestry,environmental science, politics, economics, urbandevelopment etc., as well as items in other languages andmedia, these numbers increase exponentially. Theseresources call for organisation, and focussedpresentation, as the complexity and comprehensivenessof the subject require the new user to show somedetermination to actually get to them and spend sometime learning how best to utilise them.The general objective of NaturNet-Redime (NNR) isto support the European Strategy for SD by improvingknowledge about all aspects of sustainability and provideeducation mainly about the social, economic, andenvironmental tools for the implementation of the EUStrategy on SD at both EU and international levels. Thereare two main approaches of the NNR project, whichoriginate from the two proposals that have merged tocreate the combined project. The first an interoperableInternet architecture, which focuses on innovativepresentation of different tools and data sources forlearning about sustainability. The second is learningthrough modelling, where learners develop a deepunderstanding of causes and effects by developing andexploring models of SD situations using QualitativeReasoning. Both approaches will be accessible to thepublic via the NNR portal (www.naturnet.org).SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND E-LEARNING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENTSD is adaptive, continuous and has no fixed endpoint.SD tends to be most focused on situations where jointaction is needed to ensure the common good for presentand future generations. In addition, since interventionsinvolve the creation, identification and, above all,societal sharing of risks that scientific and other expertisecannot reliably predict or prevent, they have added astrong impetus towards wider public participation indecisions on SD. The result of such factors is that SD hasa strong collective element in it, and the capacity ofsocieties for such collective action is an important factorAnnual Proceedings of Vidzeme University College “ICTE in Regional Development”, 200636