Application of the concept of partial order on comparative evaluation of environmental chemicals

The comparative evaluation of environmentally significant chemicals needs a t first protection goals, in order to decide, whether a chemical is a "bad" or a "good" one. For that decision, many detailed pieces of information ar e to be gathered. However increasing information per chemical hampers the c omparison of chemicals with respect to the protection goals. In order to avoid arbitrary aggregation functions, which often hide valuabl e information, very simple elements of the theory of partial order will be applied. The result of a comparative evaluation is a Hasse diagram. Its use fulness will be shown, an analysis of data structures and the possibility t o include elements of descriptive statistics is included. It is suggested t o supply ranking procedures (based on aggregation functions) by the Hasse d iagram technique.