An interactive data management system for river water quality data

Abstract

Water quality data banks are needed to document the status and trends of water pollution in a country. Examples of such systems are the STORET system in the U.S., the NAQUADAT system in Canada and the EIS system in Scandinavia. All of these systems require trained personnel to help in the formulation of the inquiry and the actual querying of the system.By contrast, what is described in this paper is an on-line, interactive data management and analysis system which allows the user the direct search, update, retrieval and analysis of the data from a computer terminal. The user addresses the system in a high level language closely resembling English and has complete control over building, updating and querying the individual data banks. Almost all statistical operations can be performed on the data starting from histograms, distributions, correlations to regression, discriminant, component and spectral analysis. Commands for producing camera-ready graphs on graphic terminals are available.The system is implemented on The University of Michigan Computer System and can be accessed through local telephone numbers in more than 100 cities in the U.S. and Canada and from the major European capitals via the TELENET system. The operation of the system is illustrated on a small sample data base on the Ohio river provided by the Ohio River Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO).