HE WHO HAS THE DATA WINS!

As the United States Environmental Protection Agency pushes for development of updated water quality standards across the country, states, cities, counties and townships are collecting and analyzing data at lightning speed, often without establishing a means for organizing and creating a meaningful data set from all of the collected data. As part of its long-term planning process, the City of Columbus utilized Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. to collect, analyze, and model information for the rivers in the planning area. While actual data collection was often difficult due to vandalism or theft of equipment, data management quickly became the most important and challenging task of this work due to the immense amount of data.To address the data management needs of this project as well as other projects, Malcolm Pirnie's Information Management group collaborated with the modelers and planners of the Water Environment group to develop an information management platform called Environmental Management and Analysis System (EMAS). EMAS not only provided a means to store and organize the data, but also included analysis tools and links to modeling software. Information was not only available to the user, but could be manipulated, viewed and modeled. As a result, it was not just “He Who HAS the Data Wins”, but “He Who Can FIND the Data and Do Something With It Wins”.