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GCN Home > 09/09/02 issue

Network to give EPA clearer picture

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Environmental Protection Agency receives seven major quarterly reports from state agencies and private facilities on topics ranging from drinking water to hazardous waste.

Collectors of this data send it to the EPA on disk or ftp it directly to the agency, which stores, maintains and analyzes the information to give the government a coast-to-coast view of the nation's environment.

But often EPA’s picture is less than complete because state agencies do not have the resources to input all their reports, EPA CIO Kim Nelson said.

That is why Nelson is spearheading a project to improve data integrity, ease file transfer and standardize the format of the information states submit to EPA.

The agency has created a secure Web site prototype, the National Environmental Information Exchange Network, that seven states—Delaware, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Utah—will test this fall.

“We are creating a Web services environment,” Nelson said. “We are certainly reducing the amount of burden placed on states and EPA, and we expect to see considerable cost savings and higher-quality data.”

EPA received small batches of data over the system last spring, Nelson said. States and private facilities sent 8,000 toxic release inventories to the agency in June using the network’s beta version.

Nelson said by December 2004 states will send most data through the system.

Nelson, who worked for Pennsylvania’s Environmental Protection Department for 14 years, saw firsthand the mounds of data agencies must process.

“We would receive about 60,000 reports a month and only about 25 percent were put into the system because that is all the people who did data entry could do,” she said. “We didn’t see patterns or trends, and we didn’t know what problems we would be missing because we were not looking at 75 percent of the data.”

Sorting it out

The new exchange network is a fairly simple concept. States set up a node, or server, that is linked to a main database that collects all its environmental data. Using Extensible Markup Language schemas, the information is sorted into nationally agreed upon data sets.

More news on related topics: State & Local, Web Strategies, IT in Action



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