The environmental information system for the state of Kuwait

The Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) in collaboration with Regional Information Technology and Software Engineering Center (RITSEC) in Egypt has embarked on an accelerated program to improve the information capacity of KISR by creating a national Environmental Information System (EIS). The project's first main task "Global requirement specifications" was jointly executed by the RITSEC and KISR teams. One of the main achievements of this task is the clear laying out of the project scope, and the selection of the marine environment as the main area of concern. The needed information have been identified by two approaches, first is the definition of the information required for subjects deal with various environmental aspects, and the second by the definition of information which are important to the potential beneficiaries. The outputs of these two approaches resulted in the production of comprehensive list of the needed information, and the definition of the main functions needed to support the different environmental aspects. Data availability was investigated on the basis of the information provided by KISR from different sources, in addition to the assessment of workload required for data conversion to digital format. The user orient EIS applications were identified. These included the Geographical Information System (GIS) applications, a data dictionary dealing with storing and retrieval of valuable information from KISR's final projects report, and the development of a selected environmental parameters system.