Company Profile The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Washington University in St. Louis are working toward realizing the vision of the Networked Environmental Information System for Global Emissions Inventories initiative (NEISGEI – pronounced ‘niceguy’) with the goal of applying the latest information science and technologies to open web access of disparate emissions data and analysis tools. Challenge In order to foster research, analysis and decision-making NEISGEI needed a framework for networking global air emissions inventories in a way that fostered aggregation and integration of the separate content inventories provided by the many participating groups of the air quality community. Accordingly, the EPA sought a solution that included a web portal and tasked the CAPITA team at Washington University in St. Louis with developing an appropriate platform. As CAPITA had a long history of working with portals as a means of promoting open discussion, the concept of virtual community was very familiar to them. They, in fact, keenly monitored the standards for portal interoperability, so the ability to share content with other portals was a key factor in the selection process. Other portal requirements included a catalog of distributed emission inventory data, tools for processing and analyzing the data, means for registering new data and tools, and an environment for collaboration among international research groups and policy-makers. After reviewing a number of commercial and open source products, the CAPITA team chose to develop its community air emissions portal using Liferay because of its commitment to interoperability and open standards. Liferay was also chosen for its ease of customization, which aligned with the NEISGEI vision for a truly collaborative and community-based sharing environment. Solution Leveraging Liferay Portal's functionality and its dedication to open standards, the CAPITA team created the NEISGEI web portal through which emissions data and visualization/analysis tools can now be accessed. While the initial users came primarily from the scientific community and those involved with air quality management and policy development, the community is open to the public at large as an educational resource for anyone interested. With the new portal solution, the EPA and the Air Quality community is able to facilitate better communication, sharing and learning, which ultimately results in more effective policy development. In the portal environment users can contribute their own content and provide feedback on the scientific objectives of the collective using Liferay's out of the box collaboration tools such as message boards, mail, blogs and a centralized document library, among others. Web tools and applications enabling data access, visualization and analysis have also been provided. With support from Liferay, further portlet interoperability features were introduced and will continue to develop. Leveraging Liferay’s compliance with JSR-170 industry standards, the NEISGEI portal will be able to exchange information between portlets within the portal itself as well as between the many disparate portal applications used by the air quality community. This, along with data integration, continues to be an area of greater vision and development. Said Stefan Falke, Research Professor of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University and CAPITA’s NEISGEI project lead: "With its dedication to open standards and interoperability, Liferay will serve us for years to come." Disclaimer: Liferay is not endorsed or sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis or the US Environmental Protection Agency and the opinions expressed in this case study are not necessarily those of the University or the Agency.
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