Integrating Environmental Data To Meet Multimedia Challenges

摘要

Agencies are pulling together their disparate data resources for better decision making. Environmental protection agencies have recently begun to voice a "holistic" philosophy of environmental protection. Instead of addressing one medium or one issue at a time, organizations are developing integrated, multimedia, place-based approaches that involve local decision makers. But agencies have been stymied in their efforts to implement these strategies by a deceptively simple problem: Their databases of program-specific data are frequently incompatible with each other. Even such mundane data elements as the address of a site or facility have not traditionally conformed to a standard format so that, in many cases, regulatory databases don't agree on exactly "where on the planet" regulated facilities are located. Resolving this incompatibility is a multimillion dollar problem that agencies are now trying to solve by cleaning and "integrating" their environmental databases. For example, EPA is integrating several nationwide facility databases to allow multimedia assessment and compliance. This fall the Office of Water will release a prototype of a reengineered water quality database called STORET as a client-server system.