EPA's EnviroMapper Site Honored

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has racked up yet another award for their work with GIS in delivering better intergovernmental service to the nation. This past June, the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils (FGIPC) awarded the EPA the 1999 Intergovernmental Open Systems Solutions award for their GIS-based EnviroMapper Web site. The team of GIS specialists at the EPA developed a dynamic way to view, query, and map the wealth of environmental information held in the EPA's databases. The site includes data on air, chemicals, facility information, grants and funding, hazardous waste, risk management plans, Superfund sites, toxic releases, water permits, and drinking water.

EnviroMapper is part of the Maps on Demand section of the EPA Web site, which includes other applications such as SiteInfo, ZipInfo, CountyInfo, BasinInfo, and the Facility Density Mapper for more specific mapping and reports. The program is built using Esri's MapObjects Internet Map Server (IMS) software, which provides users with interactive GIS mapping functionality by referencing the EPA's own geospatial data for the entire nation via the Internet.

EnviroMapper offers users the ability to zoom, query, pan, display multiple layers, and identify features such as schools, bodies of water, and highly populated areas. Each layer is hyperlinked to additional data (metadata) about that layer. The system allows users to view data from the national level all the way down to a single neighborhood and even displays street names. Now anyone with a simple Web browser can pinpoint their community and map its environmental data in an easily comprehensible format.

Carol M. Browner, EPA administrator, says, "Anyone can quickly obtain a snapshot of air and water quality, hazardous waste, and toxic chemicals in their own community, all on a single Web page, which can become a focal point for community partnerships, an education tool for young people, and an invaluable reference tool in libraries."

For more information, contact Dave Catlin, Enterprise Information Management Division, EPA (tel.: 202-260-3069). The USEPA can be found on the Web at www.epa.gov.

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