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in successful SD. Given this situation, societies,organisations, or individuals cannot autonomously definewhat constitutes a sustainable future or a sure pathtoward it. They have to jointly learn their waycontinuously towards such a future. The capacity of asociety for such joint learning, often termed “colearning”or “social learning” is a key element ofsuccessful SD, tackling the fundamental question of“What are we going to do next?” The required paradigmshift to SD thus requires changes in awareness, values,purposes, and identity. SD resource sites cover sitesaimed at varied target audiences from school children tothose professionally involved in the field. The leastcatered for audience would appear to be the general adultuser with lower-level academic skills. The content designof the NNR portal clearly will need to be adapted to therequirements of these target user groups.E-LEARNING STANDARD AND PLATFORMNNR adopted a ground-up strategy of developing thee-learning environment for the SD content. At thebeginning, a standardisation in the e-learningtechnological field was looked for. From the first glance,it was realised that this part of the research work will befar more complicated than anticipated. The status of thecurrent e-learning standardization is rather confusing. Inthe last few years, e-learning software has achievedcomplex structures by integrating a large number ofadditional functionalities. The most widespread standardsfor the e-learning platforms are: IEEE LOM Metadata,IMS Packaging, AICC RTE, and SCORM. SCORM wasconceived as a reference model for the first three andother specifications. In fact, what SCORM is offering isinteroperability by using its own reference model tointegrate different standards conceived by differentvendors and developers. Judging by the number of the e-learning platforms compliant with SCORM, incomparison with the other standards, we can concludethat increasingly vendors are interested in usingSCORM. As a result, an algorithm was developed for theselection of the intended e-learning platform. Within theselection, criteria are included: standardisation, licencetype, development language, database type in use, etc.The NNR consortium decided that the best platformfor the project would be ILIAS. A tool is compliant withthe SCORM standard and a powerful open sourceLearning Management System (LMS). ILIAS reachedthe LMS-RTE 3 level and therefore provides theindependent reutilisation of content.LEARNING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY ONLINENNR aims to distribute the concept of SD through theInternet by providing innovative tools and web services.The concept of SD will be demonstrated on example usecase scenarios in test regions associated to the NNRproject and on European scale as well. The scenarios areembedded in an e-Learning environment that guides theuser through structured use case modules.The focus is set on the visualisation and use ofgeographical data since the environmental pillar of SDhas a strong geographical relationship. Geographicalinformation is presented in 2D by the open sourceMinnesota Map Server that will be implemented into thee-Learning platform ILIAS. In addition to that, this datawill also be accessible by a 3D viewer that providesadditional information about the terrain. These courseswill be established for each region presenting the specificchallenges towards SD. For all the regions, geographicaldata of various kinds is available and alreadyimplemented on the web server. Economic development,in terms of industrial growth or just the increase of urbanarea can have negative effects on the environment andthe society if it is not supervised on a large scale.Environmental planners need to have appropriate toolsfor sustainable area management that providesinformation about the effects on the environmentbeforehand. For this reason a NNR specificSustainability Impact Assessment, based on theprinciples of the Environmental Impact Assessment, willbe available as learning module. The aim is to sensitizethe user to anthropogenic development projects and itsvarious side effects concerning environmental, social,and economic parameters. The module will containinteractive matrices that enable the user to rate the impactfor every single parameter. In this context, the geodatawith environmental, social, and economical relationprovide the needed information for that assessment. Inaddition to the application in the web portal, mobiledevices will be applied outdoor in order to verify and/oradd actual data to the database of the system.NATURNET-REDIME PORTALThe NNR portal objective is to provide a structure fordescribing data related to SD. This system will:• Provide data producers with appropriateinformation to characterize their data properly.• Facilitate the organization and management ofmetadata for sustainable development data.• Enable users to apply sustainable developmentdata in the most efficient way by knowing itsbasic characteristics.• Facilitate data discovery, retrieval, and reuse.Users will be better able to locate, access,evaluate, purchase, and utilize sustainabledevelopment data.• Enable users to determine whether sustainabledevelopment data, in a holding, will be of use tothem.Annual Proceedings of Vidzeme University College “ICTE in Regional Development”, 200637