Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
INTRODUCTION 7 1 Introduction A CHANGING WORLD Whether it is the air we breathe, the flowers we look forward to each spring, or the tornado that threatens our houses, the natural environment concerns us all. In our industrialized society, we count increasingly on reliable, factual information (see Box 1.1 for definitions) about the environment. Electric utility companies predict demand during heat waves; structural engineers design buildings to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes; water managers monitor each winter's snow pack. Over the past several decades it has become increasingly apparent that humans are altering climate all over the globe, whole ecosystems are being transformed, and innumerable species are becoming extinct. The implications of such fundamental changes are largely unknown, bringing a new urgency to understanding how natural systems have fared under external stresses in the past, documenting how they are responding at present, and establishing the scientific principles that allow us to predict their possible future courses. All these applicationsâhistorical, current, or predictiveâdepend on science-based measurements, gathered and analyzed within a formal or informal information system framework. In many cases, an established process exists for exchanging, compiling, and interpreting environmental data nationally and internationally. In other cases, the process is less structured, but it still takes place through research and publication in scientific journals and government statistics or reports. These data are then correlated and interpreted by scientists and engineers to provide a reliable, factual basis for actions by others. To further environmental understanding and develop good public policies for dealing with all aspects of the environment, the U.S.
INTRODUCTION 8 government invests in basic research1 and in information systems. However, declining agency budgets, which force the government to seek partners for sharing costs, as well as improvements in technology for collecting, handling, processing, and publishing data have opened new opportunities for the private sector to participate in the environmental enterprise. Although the involvement of the private sector brings potential advantages to science and society, it also introduces laws and business practices that are different from those of the scientific community. For example, international programs for global change research and environmental monitoring depend on policies guaranteeing full and open access to data (i.e., data and information made available without restriction on a nondiscriminatory basis for no more than the cost of reproduction and distribution). However, the private sector and commercialized government agencies in other countries operate in a commercial environment in which revenues must at least cover the costs of generating a data product, and controlling access to data is key to remaining competitive. Five major groups of stakeholders, each of which has different goals, generate and/or use environmental information: 1. scientists involved in generating and interpreting data; 2. government agencies involved in funding much of the enterprise and in delivering products that achieve the overall goals of understanding the environment and providing information to improve decision making concerning the environment; 3. private-sector organizations, which have an increasing role in collecting data and producing value-added products; 4. policy makers, who make informed judgments about what is in the best long-term interests of the communities they represent; and 5. the general public, in whose interest basic research and environmental monitoring are being undertaken. The purpose of this report is to identify the issues and potential conflicts that inevitably arise from interactions among these five groups. Special attention is given to the concerns of scientists, who currently 1Governments also invest in basic research because it yields enormous economic benefits. See C.I.Jones, and J.C.Williams, 1998, Measuring the Social Return to R&D, Quarterly Journal of Economics, v. 113(4), p. 1119â 1135.
INTRODUCTION 9 enjoy full and open access to an enormous quantity of government-collected data. A shift from public funding to a commercial market could relegate scientists' uses to a small niche, 2 giving scientists little or no voice in the collection of data that are necessary for understanding the environment and for generating knowledge on behalf of the public. Unless accomplished under carefully crafted conditions, such a shift with its associated increase in prices (compared with marginal cost) and restrictions on use could disrupt or even fundamentally change the scientific practices that have led to the scientific and economic successes of the last half century. The Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data was charged with examining the impact of commercialization and privatization policies (including database legislation) on established scientific practices in the environmental sciences (ocean, atmosphere, land surface, solid-earth), with an emphasis on (1) problems in obtaining, using, sharing, or publishing data and (2) solutions that have worked in the past. Because most of the information used by environmental scientists is currently collected by government agencies and managed in information systems, the committee focused on environmental information systems created purely or partly for public purposes. The committee could not assess the impact of database legislation, which 2Examples of market-driven changes that decreased the influence of scientists on further development include the personal computer revolution, the global expansion of the World Wide Web, and the privatization of Landsat. More powerful and less expensive computers have greatly benefited the scientific enterprise, but mass markets have resulted in a focus on parallel architectures. The benefits of such architectures have yet to be demonstrated for the large and complex multiply-connected computations that are characteristic of environmental simulations, but U.S. scientists have little option but to try to adapt to them. See NRC, 1998, Capacity of U.S. Climate Modeling to Support Climate Assessment Activities. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 65 pp. Similarly, the World Wide Web has provided a means for scientists to obtain and transfer enormous quantities of information, but participation by the general public has introduced long delays due to competition for bandwidth. An example in which privatization reduced the influence of scientists over data collection is Landsat-4 and -5. As a result of privatization, the strategy for acquiring global datasets critical to global change research was replaced by a strategy of collecting data over certain land-surface areas of interest to commercial customers. See NRC, 1997, Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 235 pp.
INTRODUCTION 10 does not yet exist in the United States, even though five bills have been introduced in Congress. Similarly, database legislation in Europe (the European Union Database Directive) is too recent to have affected scientific practices.3 BOX 1.1 DEFINITIONS USED IN THIS REPORT The transformation of data to knowledge takes place along a continuum of processing and interpretation. Data are numerical quantities or other factual attributes derived from observation, experiment, or calculation. Information is a collection of data and associated explanations, interpretations, or other textual material (i.e., metadata) concerning a particular object, event, or process. Products are derived in a logically consistent manner from data and become input data to higher level (i.e., more processed) products. A limited number of synthesized products, here referred to as core products, serve a wide group of users, and have been quality controlled, calibrated, and validated according to accepted scientific standards. Information systems are a framework for making systematic measurements and collecting, combining, and processing the resulting data into information products. Knowledge is information organized, synthesized, or summarized to enhance comprehension, awareness, or understanding. Understanding is the possession of a clear and complete idea of the nature, significance, or explanation of something; it is the power to render experience intelligible by ordering particulars under broad concepts.a Terms used to describe the financial exploitation of public-sector data include the following: 3The key elements of the directive remain open to conflicting interpretation and controversy. See P.B.Hugenholtz, The new database right: Early case law from Europe. Ninth Annual Conference on International IP Law & Policy, Fordham University School of Law, New York, April 10â20, 2001, 13 pp.
