Why a National Environmental Methods Index is needed
The National Water Quality Monitoring Council and the Methods and Data Comparability Board (Methods Board) were chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in 1997. The Council and Board are to review and evaluate national water monitoring activites, recommend improvements, and develop a voluntary, integrated, nationwide water quality monitoring strategy. The Methods Board is a partnership of water quality experts from federal agencies, states, tribes, municipalities, industry, and private organizations.
The Methods Board will provide the framework and the forum for comparing, evaluating, and promoting monitoring approaches that can be implemented in all appropriate water quality monitoring programs.
The selection of analytic methods is an important part of planning monitoring programs. Monitoring objectives lead to expectations for the monitoring program. Field procedures and analytic methods are selected based upon these expectations, often in conjunction with sampling designs. Once these procedures are chosen, and monitoring begun, the process is reevaluated, often continually, to ensure that the desired result is attained. It is critical that each part of this process supports the others, and the limitations of analytic techniques often determine the analytic powers of the entire program.
A high priority recommendation of the Methods Board is the development of a compendium of method summaries. The proposed National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI) will allow rapid communication and comparison of methods, thus ensuring that the consideration and reconsideration of analytic methods is a more active part of the planning and implementation of programs.
What are the
benefits of the NEMI approach?
· NEMI is proposed as part of a larger effort to improve comparability of water quality data nationwide.
· NEMI will provide a user-friendly, unified methods database searchable over the World Wide Web, thus ensuring that users from a wide range of locations receive up-to-date information with only a standard Internet connection and browser.
·
Involvement of the Methods Board will ensure that data on method precision,
accuracy, ruggedness, and cost receive multi-agency review and consensus and be
included in the database.
· Powerful equipment or sophisticated software is NOT needed to access the information.
· Future updates to the database can be done centrally.
· Because the software will be compatible with a multitude of computer platforms, after it is developed NEMI could be physically located almost anywhere for long-term storage and maintenance.
Who are the typical users of NEMI?
- Regulators, analysts, engineers, and managers from government regulatory agencies.
- Scientists from the regulated community.
- Scientists from the laboratory and engineering support communities.
- Volunteer monitoring groups.
- Academic researchers.
- The international monitoring community.
- Watershed planning organizations.
What information will be in NEMI?
- NEMI will include the
most frequently used water
analytical method summaries from various sources including the
Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, Department of
Energy, Department of Defense, American Society for Testing and Materials,
AOAC (formerly the Association of Official Analytical Chemists), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, and Standard Methods.
- These methods will
cover sample preparation for laboratory and field analyses for both
organic and inorganic analytes.
- These method summaries
would link directly to full methods on the Internet when available.
- Metadata will be
included in both tabular and text format where appropriate. Tabular format facilitates comparison of
multiple analytes and methods, and text format enhances understanding by
putting those data into context with the method abstract.
- At
least 26 data fields including method precision, accuracy, relative cost,
and ruggedness for chemicals. (Additional data fields will be necessary for
biological and microbiological methods)
How will users be able to search for and compare information
in NEMI?
By:
- Chemical/Biological
parameter
- Multiple chemicals
- Method
- Matrix (although in the
first phase only water analyses will be included)
- Key word
- Metadata
(precision, accuracy, ruggedness, etc.)
Why not use
existing methods summaries to meet the Board's goals?
· The goal for NEMI is water methods comparison; other method summaries were developed for different reasons (for example, to provide accurate citations for use in regulatory programs’ purposes).
· A state-of-the-art, Internet-accessible search engine and web-based query display system is desired for NEMI; search engines for known methods summaries lack this combination of features. Existing methods summaries are in miscellaneous formats (CDs, paper copy, etc.)
· Normalized data (metadata) for precision, bias, cost, etc. are needed for methods comparison. These data are often lacking or not normalized in existing methods summaries.
· Links from methods summaries to full methods are recommended for NEMI.
· Metadata in both tabular and text data formats are desired for NEMI.
How will NEMI
be developed?
A Steering Committee that will include
representatives of different agencies and the private sector will provide
recommendations on an ongoing, iterative basis. In the first phase, the
database will be populated with a small selected set of water analytical
methods, populated with metadata recommended through interagency consensus.
Many of the important decisions that need to be made
during the development of NEMI will be facilitated through this multi-agency
approach, thus facilitating rapid acceptance and use of NEMI. The Steering
Committee and the Methods Board will recommend the conceptual database
framework for NEMI, as well as provide guidance on normalization of metadata
that exists in several different formats in existing methods summaries.
A cooperative approach that utilizes existing
expertise at EPA Office of Water and their consultants including WPI, working
in concert with the USGS Oracle development staff, will develop the software
necessary to deploy the NEMI database on the Internet. The development team
will coordinate the collection of requirements, develop the database design and
loading routines, and organize and perform prototype testing. The development
team will also create the interface to make the database searchable over the
Web and facilitate the transfer of the database (if desired) onto the final
system.
There are a number of existing methods
summaries—these include EPA's Environmental Methods Monitoring Index (EMMI),
WPI’s (formerly known as Waste Policy Institute) Environmental Methods Summary
Database (EMSD), and others in miscellaneous formats (CD's, paper copy, etc.).
NEMI will rely heavily on the information in and the database approach used in
these existing databases. EMMI is the largest source of methods summary data
for NEMI; it contains more than 3,500 chemical and biological methods (various
methods, not just water). While smaller, EMSD is available on the Internet and
contains method abstracts and information for 36 methods. EMSD is important for
NEMI as it contains information for most data fields desired for NEMI,
including precision, accuracy, applicable concentration range, ruggedness, and
cost. Other methods summaries provide other information that can
be utilized for the development of NEMI. On an ongoing basis, the Methods Board will recommend enhancements of
NEMI that include the addition of methods as well as the population of data
fields that are now currently vacant.
Future Enhancements of NEMI
- Field sampling methods will be added in the future.
· Development of a user-friendly Data Quality Objectives-based front end are planned to increase NEMI's usefulness in the future.
What software will be used for
NEMI?
NEMI will be developed in
Oracle[1]
from the ground up. Existing legacy systems (EMMI, EMSD, others) will be used
for data model reference and to provide source data. By using Oracle technology
from the outset, it will be easier to develop a tightly integrated system.
This
software provides a large number of sophisticated features and tools for the
development of NEMI. These include tools that can search text documents such as
NEMI methods and method summaries for the existence of words, synonyms, themes,
fuzzy matches, and a host of other characteristics. A full method can thus be
reduced to a summary page that can then be manually cleaned up (i.e., make
corrections to grammar), resulting in a significant time
savings over manually producing summary pages. In addition, this data
cartridge allows the combination of
standard SQL queries with text-searching queries at the same time. This
capability is not present with most 3rd party text-searching
software, and greatly simplifies the creation of search algorithms.
In
addition, NEMI would likely benefit from the use of several other Oracle
products. Products exist to aid in the creation of the database model and
assist in the generation of customized web programs to interface into the
database (i.e., the search program). The extraction, transformation, and
loading of new methods into the database can be greatly simplified using
available software. The web site and interface programs into the database can also be easily created using existing software.