Jorge Marx-Gómez • Ralf Isenmann

Environmental reporting on the Web is a rapidly emerging and increasingly popular method. Despite considerable progress in using the Internet since the last years, companies are still in a premature stage when exploiting the benefits of this computer-based method, especially in terms of automated production and customized provision of environmental reports. Employing the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and using a harmonized Document Type Definition (DTD) for these leading reporting vehicles offer an array of benefits, in particular supporting companies’ information management along the reporting workflow.

In pursuing to elevate Internet use beyond the status of a mere platform to present and disseminate electronic duplicates of hard copy reports, we give an outline on how to harmonize different proposals of XML-based DTDs for environmental reports. These declarations on a report’s overall structure and contents have been developed by German research groups from Kaiserslautern, Magdeburg and Berlin, intended to provide a widely acceptable standard on how environmental reports might look like in terms of a forward-looking information management, suitable for advanced Internet applications. On the basis of such a harmonized DTD, companies are then in a position to exchange environmental information in an electronic, reusable data format with full interoperability.