What does ‘functionally to interoperate’ mean? Imagine that you have a cluster of meteorological stations with rainfall and temperature data for West Africa in a World Meteorological Organization database in Ghana. And you have mosquito larvae sampling data in a database at a centre of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. Then the World Health Organization maintains a malaria statistics file in Geneva for 20,000 villages for West Africa, while UNEP provides a vegetation and topographic set of maps located in the Nairobi office. These disparate databases can be harnessed for study from anywhere on the planet, using the correct search engines and collaborating web servers, to enable an individual to conceive of a question like, ‘will the weather patterns experienced over the past three weeks lead to an increase in malaria outbreaks, and if so what specific microclimates would be best served by either aerial spraying or hut spraying in which villages?’

The technology that UNEP.Net is applying to these types of questions, and science queries, is based not only on the ability to locate and identify the existence of data and information needed to help decision-making processes, but on the ability to interoperate with the data automatically in order to achieve data integration processes required to analyse and report on these important environmental and health issues. In other words, anyone can conduct scientific studies and environmental impact assessments from their desktop using other people’s data.

State-of-the-art
UNEP.Net is the current culmination of technological advances from such fields as web server interfaces, Internet map servers and geo-spatial database management. These advances in web architecture and database interoperability developed from international efforts, such as the Web Mapping Testbed of the Open GIS Consortium in combination with the Digital Earth Initiative, and the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure activities. Many agencies, such as the World Bank, FAO, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, the World Resources Institute, the National Geographic Society and the Environmental Systems Research Institute, have joined the UNEP initiative and are voluntarily cooperating on standards, thereby making the interlinkages and interoperability facilities over the Internet a reality.