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NARSTO Workshop on Innovative Methods for Emission Inventory Development and Evaluation University of Texas, Austin October 14-17, 2003 |
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Automating the Integration of Heterogeneous Databases: The California Air Resources Network (CAREN)
Eduard Hovy and Andrew Philpott
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
Brooke Hemming
US EPA/ORD
Human impacts on the atmosphere have grown to the degree that they can no longer be treated as purely localized phenomena. Plumes of anthropogenic air pollution can be seen in dramatic satellite imagery, showing particulate matter flowing from China to the western United States, from the northeastern US into the Arctic and northern Europe, from Central America into US central states. The transport of pollutants results in enhanced background levels across all geospatial scales. Within the US, efforts are underway by regional planning organizations to assemble the data needed to track this phenomenon at the regional and national scales, and to develop appropriate air quality management strategies.
A significant stumbling block for these efforts is the difficulty inherent in reconciling the range of data types and database formats that have been developed by the independent agencies responsible for local air quality and emissions data collection. The integration of data from neighboring districts and states often requires hands-on manipulation which can add months to years to the process of preparing a national emissions inventory. These delays are amplified when the assembly of international inventories is attempted, as is the case with the inventory that is mandated under the international Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP).
The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute has been funded through the NSF Digital Government Research program to develop a form of information technology that will not only overcome the obstacle of reconciling air pollution emissions and related data contained in incompatible databases, but will do so in an automated fashion, yielding a dramatic reduction in necessary staff resources for creating harmonized data sets. As database formats evolve and additional international datasets become available for the development of air quality policy that accounts for the influence of distant pollution emissions, the automated ISI data acquisition and integration tool will efficiently expand the database. Air quality management organizations from the urban to the international scale will benefit from this new capability.
The authors will present, here, the first case for which this new information technology will be applied: the Internet-based integration of emissions inventories from individual air quality management districts in California to form CAREN: The California Air Resources Network.”