Towards use of grids in environmental research, management and policy

The emerging technology of the grid will enable distributed "virtual organisations" to flexibly share resources including data, software, hardware and expertise. Potential applications in urban air quality illustrate that in addition to underpinning scientific research, grid technology can contribute strongly to environmental monitoring, decision-making and policy-making. Amongst factors that determine the extent to which this will happen are a) the investment made in establishing standards within the air quality communities for metadata, data and models, and b) the creation of toolkits that simplify the development of applications, isolating the application from grid middleware.