Environmental Reporting of Organizations – Extending the XML-based Standardization Using Topic Maps

Abstract

Environmental reporting is an essential component of an organization’s communication with its stakeholders. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is platform-independent and particularly well-suited for dealing with semi-structured data, seemed to be a good basis for creating a standardized data format for environmental reporting of organizations. Extending the XML-based standardization we use the new international topic maps standard to describe the complex structure and the meta-information of environmental reporting.