1070-986X/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE 71 Feature Article T o ensure the public’s quality of life and well being, specialists predict the envi- ronmental consequences of a proposed project or activity in environmental impact assessments (EIAs). For each European coun- try, these formal studies apply existing national and European Union legislation and scientifically sound and widely accepted methods. Under the INFO2000 (http://europa.eu.int/comm/information_society/ evaluation/pdf/report1info2000_en/pdf) project AIR-EIA (http://aix.meng.auth.gr/AIR-EIA), we developed a multimedia application to provide sci- entific and technical support to all parties involved in or affected by EIA studies and to improve the information flow and awareness concerning air- quality issues in EU countries. Our main objectives were to supply informa- tion; integrate innovative and fragmented infor- mation; and facilitate the use of multimedia-based, dynamically available EIA air-quality resources. The project led to a prototype pilot multimedia infor- mation system. The multimedia application includes Web-based interactive simulations of case studies with different air-quality models and inter- active access to a rule-based expert system imple- menting the relevant EU regulations. The CD-ROM part of AIR-EIA contains complete information on EU legislation and methodologies concerning EIA air quality and a complete tool for introducing the EIA air-quality issue to the public. Thus, it increas- es environmental awareness and promotes harmo- nization in the use of EIA air-quality information. Multimedia–EIA concept To understand the scientific and environmen- tal concepts in an EIA on air quality, readers must be familiar with the main characteristics of the air- pollution problem. Because our multimedia appli- cation targets both the specialist and the general public, we included an educational introduction to air quality for the latter. In addition, to effec- tively cover specialists’ needs for concrete and robust information regarding procedures, meth- ods, and legislation on EIA, we also used a syn- thetic educational–informational approach, which is passive, interactive, and structured. 1 When referring to a formal EIA study, we must consider its information content and its informa- tion domain. The former includes procedures (such as information on methods and available tools) and EU and national legislation concerning EIAs, while the latter is directly linked to the involved environ- mental domain. Thus, the information content refers to regulations and administrative dispositions together with scientific and technical data, while the information domain corresponds to environ- mental issues of the science applied. We had to appropriately translate the information content and information domain into multimedia content. This means that to construct the multimedia applica- tion, we took into account the end users’ require- ments for this application, which we then translated into audio-visual content. To help us do so, the project consortium included partners who had years of experience in EIA studies related to air quality and who had worked both in the EIA field as specialists and in developing relevant scientific methodologies and suggesting legislation to author- ities. Thus, we underlined two major concepts dur- ing the application’s development process: ❚ procedures, which include (in order of impor- tance) legislation (national and EU), adminis- tration guidelines, suggested methodologies from expert groups, and available scientific lit- erature; 2-5 and ❚ modeling tools, which should be interpreted as scientifically sound and widely accepted com- putational methods to assess the environmen- tal impacts studied. 6-7 A Multimedia Application for EIA Studies Kostas Karatzas and Nicolas Moussiopoulos Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Kurt Fedra Environmental Software and Services, Austria Achim Lohmeyer Lohmeyer Consulting Engineers, Germany Christos Kouroumlis Intellectron, Greece We describe a multimedia framework that combines CD-ROM and Web-based methods and tools to develop an application for air- quality environmental impact assessments (EIA). This application addresses the technical needs for an integrated and advanced reference for EIA air-quality studies and the public’s desire for information on relevant issues.