Webservice for Lower Saxony

The date to remember is August 28^th, 1996: Since that day, the state of Lower Saxony is on line. At www.niedersachsen.de you will find information from the far-sighted region in northern Germany. This includes everything from current political news to data on water quality in the North Sea - or snow conditions in the Harz region, depending on the season...

The server's concept and design were developed and realized by the Ponton European Media Art Lab for the state government of Lower Saxony.

The new server's most important feature is the search engine: it covers the server's entire content. Enter a key word and it scans through press releases, documents and whatever else is stored in the database. Results are displayed in almost no time. This way, it is not necessary to know where exactly the information is located.

To demonstrate the WWW's multimedia capabilities, RealAudio files and animated GIFs will be available from the beginning, e.g. in the WWW version of Lower Saxony's image campaign.

Another new development is the online creation and editing of press releases. Latest news are inserted directly into the servers interface. No complicated file transfer systems are necessary.

The server's design was realized by Phoor Ponton, headed by the Tempo and Wiener cult magazines' former art director Walter Schönauer. Graphics and text are reduced to the necessary; therefore the server is user friendly and stands out from the baroque design of so many other WWW sites. Form and color work were chosen along the lines of the state's CI and further simplify navigation.

The server was officially presented during the CeBIT home computer show in Hannover, Germany (August 28^th to September 1^st) at the Lower Saxony Ministry for Economy, Technology and Transportation.