The objective of the Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project is to make existing distributed environmental data available to citizens and other users through an intelligent interface acting as a one-stop shop, where users will be able to address their needs for Inland Water data through one common interface, independent of physical or logical location of the databases, the database languages used, or of the specific nomenclature used in a specific database, and without knowing which databases contain the relevant information.