Information Management for the Environmental Programme for the Danube River Basin

Information management should play a very important role in the EPDRB programme because it should enable the effective use of collected information within the Programme for the benefit of all countries involved and serve as a basis for decision-making support in the process of solving environmental problems facing all countries from the region. Danube Applied Research Projects should contribute to the achievment of these goals. In the framework of the EPDRB the activities in developing sound information management were initiated in 1996. Some fundamental results have been obtained by now. Collection and exchange of the First Phase TNMN data is organizes and approved by all reparian countries. Data for water quality determinands are collected for the years 1995 and 1996 and this activity is continued with Data Exchange File Format (DEFF). The exchange was initiated using 3.5" diskettes by traditional mail. In 1997 a succesfull attempt is made to exchange data also via electronic mail. So far data are collected from the following countries: 1. Germany (also by e-mail) 2. Austria 3. Czech Rep. (only 1995, e-mail available) 4. Slovakia 5. Hungary 6. Slovenia (also by e-mail) 7. Croatia (also by e-mail) 8. Bulgaria (diskettes with data files are incorect and cannot be used) 9. Romania (also by e-mail). Water quality data were as yet not collected from Moldavia, Ukraine and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Experimental WWW pages are produced in Croatia and the creation of similar DANUB-ECO WWW pages is proposed for the whole Danube River Basin. The access to textual databases are organised within DANIS (managed by CEIT in Slovakia) and interfaced to WWW by CEDAR at the University of Vienna. Danis provice information on: 1. EPDRB Programme and Danube SAP 2. Danube Watch 3. Working Groups 4. Danube documents, PCU Library 5. Programmes & Projects 6. REC Library Catalogue 7. Experts 8. Events 9. Danube partners 10. Standards 11. Bilateral & Multirateral Treaties12. English-Slovakia-Hungaria water vocabulary. Of course in these activities a number of problems appear which need to be solved. - Funding of basic activities of IMWG and National Information Managers is not completely solved even if the present finantial support needed is lessthan moderate. - Some countries have problems in transfering national data from local systems to DEFF. IMWG tried to solve these problems but responsible authorities from individual countries are not encouraging these attempts. - Applied Research Projects which should support information management (for example M1, M2 and M3) are not collaborating with working groups or they are not yet initiated. - Data Management Sub-Group which is suppose to coordinate development of DANIS has not been active few years. This is one of the reasons, why there is no interaction between DANIS and IMWG. - DANIS needs improvements in order to incease its efficiency. Much of the information is not any more up-to-date. Searching capabilities are not efficient and should be improved substantially. - A number of similar and relevant earlier and present activities on information management are isolated from IMWG activities. For example, earlier Rhine-Danube Project, Danube Project for Equipe Cousteau and new initiatives like Linkage grant from NATO project "Public Access to Danube Environmental Information". - The finantial resources for the improvement of DEFF and AARDVARK are not available for now. However, new technologies are appearing in the market which can fully integrate different remote Relational Data Bases (RDBMS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and World Wide Web facilities. Such new technologies can be used for information activities within EPDRB programme via INTRANET and for dissemination of information to the public via INTERNET. These new developments represent ideal tools for data management within large international programmes such as EPDRB. Unfortunately, at present finantial resources are not yet available for investigating the potential benefits in using these new technologies. One of the ARP should be dedicated to this subject. New development for data management within EPDRB should have high priority in the future ARP"s. Information management should be organised in the future within DMSG subgroup for global needs and specialised management of measured data within MLIM. However, the intensive cooperation is necesary between DMSG and MLIM SG, as well as ARP Projects. The ectablishment of the experimental WWW pages for MLIM and IMWG could serve as a practical implementation of such cooperation. This cannot be achieved without the minimum finantial resources available for these activities.