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Title: Environmental Decision Making and Information Technology: Issues Assessment

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/7911· OSTI ID:7911

This report presents a summary of the Information Technology and Environmental Decision Making Workshop that was held at Harvard University, October 1-3, 1998. Over sixty participants from across the US took part in discussions that focused on the current practice of using information technology to support environmental decision making and on future considerations of information technology development, information policies, and data quality issues in this area. Current practice is focusing on geographic information systems and visualization tools, Internet applications, and data warehousing. In addition, numerous organizations are developing environmental enterprise systems to integrate environmental information resources. Plaguing these efforts are issues of data quality (and public trust), system design, and organizational change. In the future, much effort needs to focus on building community-based environmental decision-making systems and processes, which will be a challenge given that exactly what needs to be developed is largely unknown and that environmental decision making in this arena has been characterized by a high level of conflict. Experimentation and evaluation are needed to contribute to efficient and effective learning about how best to use information technology to improve environmental decision making.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (US)
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-96OR22464
OSTI ID:
7911
Report Number(s):
ORNL/NCEDR-9; TRN: AH200116%%126
Resource Relation:
Other Information: PBD: 1 May 1999
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English