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EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) has developed a scientific environmental
information management system (EIMS) that stores, manages, and delivers descriptive information
(metadata) for data sets, databases, documents, models, multimedia, projects, and spatial information. The EIMS user community includes environmental scientists, resource managers, and other stakeholders -- both within EPA and from the general public. Partners from ORD's Regional
Vulnerability Assessment (ReVA) project, the National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA), EPA Region 10, and the Surf Your Watershed program are storing their metadata in the growing EIMS collection.
EIMS is a repository of products and metadata. The descriptive information in metadata enables users to evaluate and use these products. EIMS stores and maintains descriptive information in a relational database and refers to the products (data, documents, etc.) stored either within EIMS or as distributed external files. This architecture supports the management of remote sensing data, geographical information system (GIS) coverages, and other types of data for which entry into relational tables is not appropriate. Descriptive information stored within EIMS is consistent with the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata content standards for spatial data. A significant enhancement of these standards, however, is the addition of a hierarchical metadata framework that organizes detailed scientific data and documentation, and accommodates customized information at the catalog level to facilitate a review of the different types of metadata in EIMS.
The EIMS repository of scientific documentation, accessed with standard Web browsers, places a
virtual library on the desktop of EPA staff and others with Internet access. Users can search within
EIMS to find information resources of interest based upon topic or defined criteria related to types of
environmental resources, geographical extent, date, or content origin. These user-defined searches
typically are more efficient than currently used Web search engines.
Click here to navigate to the EIMS (http://www.epa.gov/eims/).
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