Sunday, August 10, 2008

Web 2 format for Environmental Product Data?

The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) has issued a Request for Tender for Provision of Desktop, LAN, Helpdesk and Midrange Services. This asks for detailed environmental performance data, so I asked my ANU metadata students how that could be supplied via the web:
COMP6341 students: The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) issued a Request for Tender for "Provision of Desktop, LAN, Helpdesk and Midrange Services" last week. The 278 page tender document includes extensive and detailed environmental requirements.

Tenderers are required to provide the information specified in the IEEE 1680 environmental standard. The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) is a spreadsheet manufacturers can use to fill in to rate their products and then upload the results to a central database. The information can be displayed as a web page and can be exported as a spreadsheet.

But less than a thousand computer products are listed by EPEAT. Many more have not been rated using their system and manfacturers may also have to list their products under schemes in Europe and elsewhere. Manufacturers already provide product information on their web sites. Having to supply data in different formats to different rating organisations is an addition burden.

Look at the EPEAT entry for the DELL OptiPlex 745 Energy Smart:

  1. What are some options for marking up the information about the DELL OptiPlex 745 in an HTML and/or XML format, so it could be read by the general public as a web page and also automatically input the databases of different rating bodies? The web page should similar to the ones Dell supplies, but have metadata embedded in it.
  2. What are the benefits of different ways to mark up the metadata?

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