Chapter 7 - Introduction and Overview of Results

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project, whose main objective was to make existing distributed environmental-data available to citizens and other users through an intelligent interface acting as a one-stop shop. This interface was meant to be independent of physical or logical location of the databases, the database languages used, or the specific nomenclature used in a specific database. The main idea was to develop a system based on the technology of independent software agents, where each of the agents have a specific task in the complex process leading from the question raised by the user, through the formulation of specific (but database independent) queries to the specific queries sent to databases that the agents evaluate as potentially having an answer or a part of the answer for the actual question. A number of results were obtained during the project, resulting in a prototype. The prototype, where independent software agents operate on a limited number of databases and in a limited number of languages, shows the value of various advanced information technologies for environmental data exchange, thereby easing environmental reporting and planning.