Each of these groups will be interested in a particular presentation form of the data coming from the models or from data bases, depending on their field. The complexity of the physical system is so large that most of the combined effort of everyone involved in creating support systems, is directed towards creating better models of aspects of the physical systems involved. These efforts have lead to a number of useful systems that will accurately model behaviour of, mostly transport related, phenomena in hydrogeological and hydrological systems. Development of support for such systems has been the second most pursued task. The rapid development of new, faster hardware and new software, leaves plenty of room for more such development.
Decision makers find themselves facing software and hardware incompatibilities many a time.
Technically any computer system can be made toimitate any other, at a price. This may be true enough for developers, but decision makers are faced with an unnecessary choice, to use only one system but no others, because getting them to communicate is far too expensive. A number of attempts have been made to overcome this problem. All these standards have a crucial common aspect, the vocabulary of the standard is fixed. Changing the vocabulary or the syntax, requires extensive rewriting of all software that tries to adhere to the standard, in fact this used to be a perfect mechanism to bond clients to the developers and has ultimately lead to the concept of open architectures.