Distributed environmental impact assessment using Internet Huang Yan, Dimitri P. Solomatine, Slavco Velickov and Michael B.Abbott Huang Yan Forest Department, Bureau of Hydrology, CWRC, Jiefang Avenue 1555#, 430010, Wuhan, China E-mail: meiindhi@hotmail.com Dimitri P. Solomatine Slavco Velickov Michael B. Abbott International Institute for Infrastructural, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering—IHE, Westvest 7, 2601 DA Delft, The Netherlands E-mails: mba@ihe.nl; sol@ihe.nl; velic@ihe.nl ABSTRACT The ever more widespread use of the Internet now makes it possible to bring many more persons than hitherto into environmental impact assessment and resulting decision-making processes. Because most at these persons are non-experts, however, it is necessary to provide them with tools that will support their assessments and decision-making efforts. When these tools are directed primarily to the making of judgements they may be described as judgement engines. The need to promote cooperative attitudes among participants in the assessment and judgemental/decision-making process, requires that these tools should promote transparency. Judgemental processes are introduced and related to evaluation processes so as to provide a characterisation of transparency. This paper gives an overview of the relevant Internet technologies and then takes the reader through the conception and realisation of one client–server component of an Internet-distributed judgement engine for environmental impact assessment. Because this is built upon the MikeImpact judgement engine of the Danish Hydraulic Institute, it is called a Web-MikeImpact. Although possibly of interest to specialists in information and control technologies, this paper is primarily intended as a background for potential users of Web-MikeImpact. It should be used alongside the use of the artefact that it describes, as this is available on http://www.hi.ihe.nl/hi/test/mikeimpact/mikeindex1.htm. Key words | environmental impact, internet-distributed decision making INTRODUCTION Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has traditionally been the prerogative of small groups of experts. Correspondingly, the tools that have been provided to expedite EIA processes have usually been configured exclusively for the use of such experts and groups of experts. With the rapidly ongoing development of the Internet, however, many other persons now wish to make their own assessments, whether as individuals or as inter- est groups. They are persons who, although for the most part not experts, are vitally interested in and concerned about the environmental impacts of certain interventions in nature. They are particularly concerned about the impacts of such interventions upon the qualities of their lives (Abbott & Jonoski 1998). So that non-experts may appreciate the nature of the interventions in nature with which they are confronted and so that they may make realistic estimates of the effect of these interventions on their own life quality, these non-experts need to be sup- ported by a new class of tools. Since these tools are concerned with the making of judgements on the basis of facts provided for the most part by existing tools, such as those developed for such purposes as both data collection and processing and for modelling, they are called judge- ment engines. The tools that are used for assembling ‘the facts of the matter’ for the use of judgement engines are then called fact engines. Processes that involve the making of judgements can be exceedingly various, complicated and convoluted. One possible representation of such processes proceeds through strings of implications, such as: 59 © IWA Publishing 1999 Journal of Hydroinformatics | 01.1 | 1999