Practical Solutions

Natural Resource Reporting

Problem: Easy, integrated access to a wide range of environmental and community data.

Client: Client: Community Access to Natural Resources Information, New South Wales Government, Australia.

Requirement: To integrate information from the great variety of environmental data sources in the region, stored in distributed, isolated databases across many organizations.

Solution: Create a single point of easy, integrated access to a wide range of environmental and community data. Using standardized online access to the participating organizations' data, we were able to create a number of highly useful web applications to display and analyze data from distributed sources.

Data sources accessed by CANRI applications range from base maps from AUSLIG (the Australian National Mapping Agency), to catchment area maps from the Department of Land and Water Conservation, soil data from the New South Wales land and soil database and space imagery from NASA.

The CANRI framework, launched in March 2001, is the world's first truly integrated natural resources portal. It would not have been possible without Social Change Online's WebMapping technology.

The community has a right to know about the environment - it affects everyone. And environmental management and planning decisions should be based on all relevant information, considered as a whole. No single organisation holds all the answers: natural resources information is distributed across a broad range of government, business and community organisations. Even with the new opportunities offered by the Internet, finding the information you need can be a nightmare.

Frameworks are required to organise the sharing and interpretation of information. One such framework is CANRI, which uses the Internet to connect the information resources of many different organisations in situ, without requiring them to surrender their data to any centralised repository.

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