WAIS through the Web - Discovering Environmental Information

The Need for Directories

Effective management of geographic information involves knowing what resources are available, the uses to which the data can be applied, its quality, and its network location.

It also involves providing simple means to find and access those data sets across a network. We need to be able to ask questions like "show me data sets about this topic, satisfying the specified criteria, that are relevant to this geographic region".

The following issues should be considered in order to implement successful directories :

• Distributed indices at sites that are nodes of a computer network so that they are under the control of the relevant custodians. This ensures the data will be updated and otherwise maintained by those best able to do so;

• Documentation of data sets should be an easy matter to encourage the metadata descriptions to be readily completed;

• Environmental information is a valuable resource. It is often expensive and difficult to generate. Before new work is carried out a search should be able to be made to find out what information already exists so that it is not duplicated;

• Directories need to point directly to relevant information without the user having to wade through lots of data sets that do not suit the current purpose;

• The general idea is to discover data sets that would most likely be relevant and then follow links to more descriptive information to see if the data suits the purpose and is fit for use.