WAIS through the Web - Discovering Environmental Information

About Environmental Information

By the very nature of the word, "environmental" encompasses a wide variety of information from many diverse disciplines. There is information on flora (the plants), fauna (the animals), soils, climate, topography (the shape and form of the earth's surface), World Heritage Areas, water quality, rivers, oceans, pollution, vegetation cover, census, population, socio-economic, the state of the environment, endangered species, climate change, environmental monitoring, land degradation, etc.

The information is in many forms...

maps;

reports and documents;

data files;

themes and layers in a Geographic Information System (GIS);

satellite imagery and other remotely sensed data;

records in a Relational Database Management System;

images (including photographs);

bibliographies;

sequences of images as animations;

links to related World Wide Web documents.

The revolution that the World Wide Web, Gopher, and WAIS are bringing about is opening up access to a burgeoning amount of information. Never before has it been so easy to access information or to make it available.

Already it is obvious that we are swamped with the surfeit of information and we need to have intuitive means to navigate our way through it.