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# Why a National Environmental Methods Index is needed

The **National Water Quality Monitoring Council** and the **Methods and
Data Comparability Board (Methods Board)** were chartered under the
Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in 1997. The Council and Board are
to review and evaluate national water monitoring activites, recommend
improvements, and develop a voluntary, integrated, nationwide water
quality monitoring strategy. The Methods Board is a partnership of water
quality experts from federal agencies, states, tribes, municipalities,
industry, and private organizations.

> ***The Methods Board will provide the framework and the forum for
> comparing, evaluating, and promoting monitoring approaches that can be
> implemented in all appropriate water quality monitoring programs.***

The selection of analytic methods is an important part of planning
monitoring programs. Monitoring objectives lead to expectations for the
monitoring program. Field procedures and analytic methods are selected
based upon these expectations, often in conjunction with sampling
designs. Once these procedures are chosen, and monitoring begun, the
process is reevaluated, often continually, to ensure that the desired
result is attained. It is critical that each part of this process
supports the others, and the limitations of analytic techniques often
determine the analytic powers of the entire program.

A high priority recommendation of the Methods Board is the development
of a compendium of method summaries. The proposed National Environmental
Methods Index (NEMI) will allow rapid communication and comparison of
methods, thus ensuring that the consideration and reconsideration of
analytic methods is a more active part of the planning and
implementation of programs.

> **What are the benefits of the NEMI approach?**

-   NEMI is proposed as part of a larger effort to improve comparability
    of water quality data nationwide.

-   NEMI will provide a user-friendly, unified methods database
    searchable over the World Wide Web, thus ensuring that users from a
    wide range of locations receive up-to-date information with only a
    standard Internet connection and browser.

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-   Involvement of the Methods Board will ensure that data on method
    precision, accuracy, ruggedness, and cost receive multi-agency
    review and consensus and be included in the database.

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-   Powerful equipment or sophisticated software is NOT needed to access
    the information.

-   Future updates to the database can be done centrally.

-   Because the software will be compatible with a multitude of computer
    platforms, after it is developed NEMI could be physically located
    almost anywhere for long-term storage and maintenance.

**Who are the typical users of NEMI?**

-   Regulators, analysts, engineers, and managers from government
    regulatory agencies.

-   Scientists from the regulated community.

-   Scientists from the laboratory and engineering support communities.

-   Volunteer monitoring groups.

-   Academic researchers.

-   The international monitoring community.

-   Watershed planning organizations.

**What information will be in NEMI?**

-   NEMI will include the most frequently used **water analytical**
    method summaries from various sources including the Environmental
    Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Energy,
    Department of Defense, American Society for Testing and Materials,
    AOAC (formerly the Association of Official Analytical Chemists),
    U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Standard Methods.

-   These methods will cover sample preparation for laboratory and field
    analyses for both organic and inorganic analytes.

-   These method summaries would link directly to full methods on the
    Internet when available.

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-   Metadata will be included in both tabular and text format where
    appropriate. *Tabular format facilitates comparison of multiple
    analytes and methods, and text format enhances understanding by
    putting those data into context with the method abstract.*

-   At least 26 data fields including method precision, accuracy,
    relative cost, and ruggedness for chemicals. (Additional data fields
    will be necessary for biological and microbiological methods)

**How will users be able to search for and compare information in
NEMI?**

> By:

-   Chemical/Biological parameter

-   Multiple chemicals

-   Method

-   Matrix (although in the first phase only water analyses will be
    included)

-   Key word

-   Metadata (precision, accuracy, ruggedness, etc.)

**Why not use existing methods summaries to meet the Board\'s goals?**

-   The goal for NEMI is water methods comparison; other method
    summaries were developed for different reasons (for example, to
    provide accurate citations for use in regulatory programs'
    purposes).

-   A state-of-the-art, Internet-accessible search engine and web-based
    query display system is desired for NEMI; search engines for known
    methods summaries lack this combination of features. Existing
    methods summaries are in miscellaneous formats (CDs, paper copy,
    etc.)

-   Normalized data (metadata) for precision, bias, cost, etc. are
    needed for methods comparison. These data are often lacking or not
    normalized in existing methods summaries.

-   Links from methods summaries to full methods are recommended for
    NEMI.

-   Metadata in both tabular and text data formats are desired for NEMI.

**How will NEMI be developed?**

A Steering Committee that will include representatives of different
agencies and the private sector will provide recommendations on an
ongoing, iterative basis. In the first phase, the database will be
populated with a **small selected set of water analytical methods**,
populated with metadata recommended through interagency consensus. Many
of the important decisions that need to be made during the development
of NEMI will be facilitated through this multi-agency approach, thus
facilitating rapid acceptance and use of NEMI. The Steering Committee
and the Methods Board will recommend the conceptual database framework
for NEMI, as well as provide guidance on normalization of metadata that
exists in several different formats in existing methods summaries.

A cooperative approach that utilizes existing expertise at EPA Office of
Water and their consultants including WPI, working in concert with the
USGS Oracle development staff, will develop the software necessary to
deploy the NEMI database on the Internet. The development team will
coordinate the collection of requirements, develop the database design
and loading routines, and organize and perform prototype testing. The
development team will also create the interface to make the database
searchable over the Web and facilitate the transfer of the database (if
desired) onto the final system.

There are a number of existing methods summaries---these include EPA\'s
Environmental Methods Monitoring Index (EMMI), WPI's (formerly known as
Waste Policy Institute) Environmental Methods Summary Database (EMSD),
and others in miscellaneous formats (CD\'s, paper copy, etc.). NEMI will
rely heavily on the information in and the database approach used in
these existing databases. EMMI is the largest source of methods summary
data for NEMI; it contains more than 3,500 chemical and biological
methods (various methods, not just water). While smaller, EMSD is
available on the Internet and contains method abstracts and information
for 36 methods. EMSD is important for NEMI as it contains information
for most data fields desired for NEMI, including precision, accuracy,
applicable concentration range, ruggedness, and cost. Other methods
summaries provide other information that can be utilized for the
development of NEMI. **On an ongoing basis, the Methods Board will
recommend enhancements of NEMI that include the addition of methods as
well as the population of data fields that are now currently vacant.**

**Future Enhancements of NEMI**

-   Field sampling methods will be added in the future.

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-   Development of a user-friendly Data Quality Objectives-based front
    end are planned to increase NEMI\'s usefulness in the future.

**What software will be used for NEMI?**

NEMI will be developed in Oracle[^1] from the ground up. Existing legacy
systems (EMMI, EMSD, others) will be used for data model reference and
to provide source data. By using Oracle technology from the outset, it
will be easier to develop a tightly integrated system.

This software provides a large number of sophisticated features and
tools for the development of NEMI. These include tools that can search
text documents such as NEMI methods and method summaries for the
existence of words, synonyms, themes, fuzzy matches, and a host of other
characteristics. A full method can thus be reduced to a summary page
that can then be manually cleaned up (i.e., make corrections to
grammar), resulting in a significant time savings over manually
producing summary pages. In addition, this data cartridge allows the
combination of standard SQL queries with text-searching queries at the
same time. This capability is not present with most 3^rd^ party
text-searching software, and greatly simplifies the creation of search
algorithms.

In addition, NEMI would likely benefit from the use of several other
Oracle products. Products exist to aid in the creation of the database
model and assist in the generation of customized web programs to
interface into the database (i.e., the search program). The extraction,
transformation, and loading of new methods into the database can be
greatly simplified using available software. The web site and interface
programs into the database can also be easily created using existing
software.

[^1]: Use of trade names is for identification purposes only and does
    not constitute endorsement by the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S.
    Environmental Protection Agency, or any other agency or organization