Environmental Monitoring Information System of Kuwait (eMISK) is an ambitious system initiated by the Environment Public Authority (EPA) of Kuwait. eMISK aims to establish, build and maintain a comprehensive geo-environmental database of Kuwait along with an enterprise level GIS system for access, update and analysis of the environmental data. This geo-environmental database will be made available through eMISK to the decisions makers and the stakeholders from within EPA, outside agencies and to the public at large. Among the main goals of eMISK are to raise awareness at all levels of Kuwaiti Society of the values of the environment, and to place authoritative scientific information at the center of decision-making. eMISK spans over 3 phases, the 1st of which has started in October 2009 and is anticipated to establish a complete geo-environmental database for Kuwait, including the required infrastructure, and to develop the human capital within EPA, for using and maintaining the geodatabase, by the end of 2011. Phase 2 is aimed at the development of domain-specific environmental models and simulations to help address specific environmental issues in Kuwait. The third and the last phase of eMISK will be focused on the development of spatial decision support systems for issues relevant to the environment (see the figure).
The main objectives of eMISK – Phase 1 can be summarized as follows:
- Establish eMISK infrastructure
- Design and develop environmental geodatabase for Kuwait
- Design and develop of user-friendly interfaces for data entry, retrieval, updating, browsing, analysis and reporting
- Communicate and promote environmental awareness among the Kuwaiti society through environmental maps, reports and environmental data portal
- Develop the EPA human resources in environmental data analysis and modeling
- Develop the mechanisms for efficient environmental monitoring
eMISK is housed within the state-of-the-art infrastructure at the Kuwait Environmental Monitoring Center (KEMC) premises within EPA and is composed of seven high end servers, 16 GIS workstations and about 50 EPA-wide users connected through Intra-net based applications built on ArcGIS Server. eMISK is accessible to the researchers, students and the specialists from other organizations over the internet. eMISK will cater to the environmental data needs of public of all categories and ages from within and outside Kuwait through the planned environmental data portal being developed under the same project. The figure below provides a map of the target user groups.
eMISK will gather all relevant geo-environmental information from the within the EPA, from other pertinent organizations, and also from recent first hand sources of information including the high-resolution satellite imageries and field surveys.
The planned Environmental Portal of Kuwait (www.beatona.org) is intended to share all available environmental information produced by various stakeholders over the World Wide Web to facilitate easy access to environmental information of Kuwait. This portal is intended as a one-stop-shop for all available environmental data and information on Kuwait, and is expected to play a leading role in raising the awareness of the value of the environment among the residents of Kuwait. A kids-corner as well as public participation activities are among the planned functions of this web portal.
One of the main objectives of eMISK is developing the skills of the EPA technical staff in order to be able to use, update and present the content of the potential Geo-Environmental database. This is planned through intensive on-the-job training, in which the eMISK staff would be practically involved in all data preparation, digitization, development and mapping processes.