Das Projekt "Lakebase: Erarbeitung einer Datenbank-Infrastruktur für Langzeitdaten in deutschen Seen und Talsperren" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Technische Universität Dresden, Institut für Hydrobiologie, Professur für Limnologie (Gewässerökologie) durchgeführt. Continuous long-term records of German lakes and reservoirs are unique worldwide with respect to the length of the observational periods spanning several decades, due to their unique high temporal and taxonomic resolution (mostly phytoplankton, zooplankton, macrozoobenthos, macrophytes and fish) and due to the fact that different lake types with respect to morphometry, trophic state and catchment type are covered. For most lakes a full set of the most important abiotic driving forces are available for more than 30 years. What is missing as of yet, is a modern and general-accepted state of the art database for the screening of diverse long-term data sets that have general applicability and that are well defined to (1) conserve the currently available long-term data of lakes, (2) to protect its integrity and ownership, (3) to guarantee their readily availability for generations to come, (4) to establish a substructure to be incorporated in international networks (in particular the LTER North Temperate Lake). Import mechanisms are developed that allow for the automatic upload of future extensions of the incorporated datasets. In a first step we equip the available time series with sufficient metadata, building on already existing standards. In a second step we need to format data files in order to convert the diverse data files to be suitable for the import onto LakeBase. Given the diverse nature of data and data formats from the different lakes - transfer of data into LakeBase will be challenging and will require some adaptations or extensions of the existing database infrastructure. By mapping user-specified concept names to ontological concepts, it will become possible to first, ensure interoperability with external sources and, second, to use reasoning techniques, to query, e.g., for all temperature values or all nutrients. With this, a new stage of interoperability will be reached.