Software agents link isolated islands of water data

Tracking environmental information about inland water is vital to manage and maintain water quality and ecology, but currently most of it is in scores of dispersed data 'islands'. "Some EU countries could have over 20 different databases, from computer records kept by a single researcher to massive data warehouses maintained by the Ministry of Environment," says Dr Palle Haastrup, a researcher at the Joint Research Centre's Institute for Environment and Sustainability, and coordinator of the IST programme-funded Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project. Most often, these different databases use a wide variety of software, in many languages and using different data formats. "Even the concepts governing specific terms vary. One country's measure of quality might relate to filtered water, while another country uses unfiltered." More prosaically, though very important, is simply getting access to the data in the first place. See IST Cordis website for further information.