With recent additions and planned improvements, the National Environmental Data Index World Wide Web site is a useful stop on the Internet for anyone interested in environmental and scientific data maintained by federal agencies. This portal site provides a listing of environmental data produced by federal agencies and a link to where the information can be located. In some cases, a user can link directly to an actual document, such as a piece of legislation or a press release. NOAA launched NEDI in 1994 based on a recommendation by Vice President Al Gore's then-National Performance Review. The results from the different agencies are collected and presented to users in a unified format, Freedman said.
Users then choose particular headlines that are sorted by agency and data source.
In some cases, the information is robust, and in other cases, it is cryptic, he said. NEDI searches across indexes maintained by most federal agencies including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and Health and Human Services as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. Recently, NOAA added listings from the Transportation Department, including the Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In addition to expanding the number of listings NEDI can search across, NOAA plans to add a thesaurus to the search page, making search results more complete. For example, if a term is ambiguous, the thesaurus will help the user look at other variations of the word to identify the specific meaning intended.