Improving the Timeliness of Environmental Management Information Systems with Data Crawling Techniques

With global warming taking center stage, it is becoming clear that environmental information plays a critical role for monitoring, educating, and taking control measures. Currently the environmental data are gathered in a somewhat hierarchical system where mostly governments, NPOs and other organizations collect the data and feed in to world organizations for final analysis and monitoring purposes causing considerable time lags. Using crawling methods and accessing data stored in multiple data sources, and storing in an appropriately designed database could be a key to monitor the global warming in a much more comprehensive and timely manner. An automated software agent can be designed to maintain a collection of data sources. Such Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) works like a centralized system extracting data in real time from websites, which can serve as the springboard for various tasks. The objective of this paper is to present a review of existing EMISs and discuss the practicability of using data crawling techniques in EMIS.