As environmental issues have become more interdisciplinary and more global, the distinctions among the user communities have become fuzzier. These efforts are key to improvement of the agency's public data and information services. By providing online access to data and information services, enhancements go far beyond simple convenience of access for the user. NOAA's massive online databases will become searchable by electronic means and therefore contributing to the user's productivity. Online data are placed in the context of other institutions' data to create, in effect, a massive and searchable national and international database.
Online data enables user integration of multiple datasets into customized products.
Online datasets can be updated instantaneously for the entire user community without incurring the cost of mailing updates to potentially tens of thousands of users. Some of the coming technologies hold great promise for the future. There are many ways that all of you may contribute to the enhancement and expansion of NOAA's presence on the World Wide Web. Your participation in this workshop is one example. A follow-on working group has been established to extend the earlier work and to develop the guideline, procedures and mechanisms to ensure that we provide the most current information on the Internet that is also of the highest quality.