From pdh@u.washington.eduFri Sep 8 15:56:01 1995 Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 11:56:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Preston Hardison Reply to: indknow@u.washington.edu To: Indknow List Subject: CIESIN/SEDAC Policy Instruments On-Line International Environmental Agreements On-line CIESIN and its Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) are pleased to announce the availability of the prototype Policy Instruments Database (PIDB), an on-line tool for browsing and searching of text, summaries, and status of treaties and other international agreements related to global environmental change and sustainable development. The WWW Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the PIDB is: http://sedac.ciesin.org/pidb/pidb-home.html The PIDB allows users on the Internet with a WWW browser or telnet access to ask basic questions about environmental treaties such as "Which treaties are in force for a given country?"; "Which treaties had entered into force by a given date?"; and "What is the text of a given treaty?" Getting the answers to such questions might have taken hours or days of research using traditional methods. Now, users can get their answers in seconds or minutes over the Internet. In many cases they can also link directly to the international bodies responsible for overseeing the treaties and to other related information resources. "Policy instruments" are broadly defined to include legal documents such as treaties, agreements, and laws; information on the negotiation, structure, and status of these legal instruments; and directives, initiatives, and statements from government agencies and non-governmental organizations. The policy instruments included here cover nine global environmental issues: global climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, transboundary air pollution, desertification and drought, conservation of biological diversity, deforestation, oceans and their living resources, trade and the environment, and population. This initial version of the database includes the full text of 120 international environmental treaties and information on important dates and actions. The PIDB was developed as a proof of concept and should be considered highly developmental. As with every developmental technology project, there are known problems that we are working to remedy. However, we have now reached a stage where we will feel we will benefit from feedback from a wider variety of external users. The Policy Instruments Database is a cooperative venture that would not have been possible without the participation of several different organizations that have each made significant prior investments in developing relevant capabilities. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), partners in CIESIN's Information Cooperative, shared information resources that they have developed to track the status and content of international treaties related to the environment; Freedom House provided socioeconomic and political data; the Multilaterals Project at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy provided some digitized treaty texts; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded the data integration and the development of the data access system through SEDAC, which is one of nine data centers in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System. You will need a forms-capable WWW browser like Netscape or Mosaic 2.00 to take full advantage of the database's relational search capabilities. Alternately, if you have telnet access to the Internet you may telnet to infoserver.ciesin.org and log in as "lynx" to use a character-oriented WWW browser. Although we cannot currently provide e-mail access to the PIDB's Web resources, we do hope to be able to offer (or point to) such a service in the future. To learn more about the PIDB, please contact CIESIN by e-mail to pidb@ciesin.org, or call CIESIN user services at 517/797-2727. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Zimmerman Research Scientist, Environmental Research Institute of Michigan Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) 4251 Plymouth Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48105 Phone: 313/741-4657 | Fax: 313/663-6622 e-mail: fzimmerm@ciesin.org | WWW URL: http://sedac.ciesin.org/