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GCN Home > 02/04/08 issue

Molly O'Neill | EPA the Web 2.0 way

GCN Interview

By Joab Jackson

PEOPLE DEMAND good data, especially when it comes to matters of human health and the environment.

They get frustrated when it isn’t easily available or if they feel it’s incomplete or not organized in a way that’s useful. So, not surprisingly, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Information Officer Molly O’Neill is intrigued by the new crop of Web 2.0 technologies that could help better deliver information and establish forums for the resulting discussions.

O’Neill spoke with GCN about a successful wiki-based pilot involving the Puget Sound Leadership Council in addition to the challenges agencies face handling large amounts of data.
GCN: What is unique about the type of data EPA works with?

MOLLY O’NEILL: We have a lot of scientific data, so for us, data standards are really important. We also have a lot of regulatory data — that is, the data that industry gives to government. But we delegate much of the implementation of our regulations to the states. So the data goes from industry to the states to EPA. We have to ensure the data quality from the time the samples were pulled.

This is a role that the National Environmental Information Exchange Network plays. One of the most important things about the network is that it facilitates the exchange of the data among all the parties. The idea is that we don’t touch it. It is all done in [Extensible Markup Language] and Web services. So we’re not trying to reformat. We don’t break interfaces or do double data entries, which may compromise the data quality or our decisions when we use this data for analysis.

GCN: So the exchange network is a bit like the DHS/DOJ National Information Exchange Model for environmental data?

O’NEILL: That’s right. We were already starting to implement the Exchange Network when NIEM came along, so we were excited to see a very similar model. It is a little bit easier on the environmental side because a lot of our data is not sensitive.

EPA’s point on the Exchange Network is the Central Data Exchange (CDX). We can leverage that infrastructure to communicate with other agencies now that we are doing Web services.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Data Management, Web Strategies



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