The European Environment Agency (EEA), Esri and Microsoft Corp. today announced, at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the launch of the Eye on Earth network, an online community for developing innovative services that map environmental parameters. The new cloud computing-based network provides a collaborative online service for hosting, sharing and discovering data on the environment and promotes the principles of public data access and citizen science. In addition, the organisations also announced NoiseWatch, a new web service available on the Eye on Earth network that measures noise in 164 European cities. <\/p>\n
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The Eye on Earth network provides organisations with a security-enhanced central location for managing their geospatial environmental content. It uses Esri’s ArcGIS Online cloud services coupled with Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure, and it hosts the data in the Environmental Data Store. The network’s user interface enables the easy creation and sharing of map-based services, translating complex scientific data into accessible, interactive and visual web services. With Eye on Earth, users can create and share maps within their organisation or make the content publicly available as web-accessible services. Eye on Earth was first launched in 2008 as part of a public-private partnership between the EEA and Microsoft with the joint goal of making environmental data available to all 600 million citizens across the EEA’s 32 member and seven cooperating countries. <\/p>\n
“The launch of the Eye on Earth network is a great leap forward in helping organisations provide the public with authoritative data on the environment and in helping citizens around the world better understand some of the most pressing environmental challenges in their local area,” said Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of EEA. “With the input of environmental stakeholders globally, we’re pleased to see the network expand and become a vital service for those interested in learning more about the environment. Environmental policy makers also have a new tool to understand and visualise environmental information to support good environmental policy making.”<\/p>\n