Throughout the world a staggering amount of resources have been used to
obtain billions of environmental data points. Some, such as
meteorological data, have been organized for weather map display where
many thousands of data points are synthesized in one compressed map.
Most environmental data, however, are still widely scattered and
generally not used for a systems approach, but only for the purpose for
which they were originally taken. These data are contained in relatively
small computer programs, research files, government and industrial
reports, etc. This Conference was called to bring together some of the
world's leaders from research centers and government agencies, and
others concerned with environmental data management. The purpose of the
Conference was to organize discussion on the scope of world
environmental data, its present form and documentation, and whether a
systematic approach to a total system is feasible now or in the future.
This same subject permeated indirectly the Stockholm Conference on the
environment, where, although no single recommendation came forth
suggesting a consolidated environmental data pool, bank or network, each
recommendation indicated that substantial environmental data needed to
be obtained or needed to be pooled and analyzed from existing data
sources.