Internet Renewable energy Information System (IRIS)

Even though the Internet is now a widely accessible data source, the unorganised flood of information makes a specific request e.g. for renewable energy products inefficient. In addition, existing databases on renewable energies are often old and incomplete. The objective of IRIS has been to organise and retrieve renewable energy product information on the Internet instead of collecting it manually. Updating coincides with the self interestself-interest of manufacturers to present their latest renewable energy products on their own HTML documents. IRIS is based on a set of powerful tools and intends to find, extract, collect and index HTML documents with standardised META tags that are widely spread across web servers on the Internet. This paper presents the structure of IRIS, the software tools, and gives one example of how to categorise and prepare web-sites with product information on biogas systems in order to become part of IRIS. IRIS has been developed in the context of the project „AVALANCHE" which is partly funded under the JOULE programme of the European Commission DGXII.Keywords: Renewable Energy Technologies - Electronic Commerce - Information System - META-tags