Water Quality Management and Information Systems

Problems and approaches in developing an information system that will most effectively aid the planners are presented. The analysis of information needs centers around the concept of a system's complexity. A simpler information system has only the function of retrieving data from a data base. STORET, the information retrieval system currently being used by the states' stream pollution control boards, is an example. A much more complex system is one that has the capability of interfacing application programs with the data base, as does GPLAN, the system presented in this paper. River models and simulators are controlled by GPLAN to take its output from a data base and store its output in this same data base for later reference. GPLAN offers an information retrieval language approaching a natural-language syntax and allows the user to command execution of the application programs via the query language.