Affiliations: [a] GSF, Projektgruppe Umweltgefährdungspotentiale von Chemikalien, Ingoldstädter Landst. 1, 8042 Neuherberg, FRG | [b] Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Landesentwicklung und Umweltfragen, Rosenkavalierplatz 2, 8000 München, FRG
Abstract: The need for improved information systems in recent years has been made critical by the steady growth in size and complexity of host organizations and data. There exists a huge amount of data sources, either manual sources like handbooks, tables, monographs, reports, reviews, company directories etc., or computerized databases in the field of environmental chemicals. To facilitate access and to retrieve the information wanted efficiently, we built up two “databanks of data sources”, one called “Databank of Manual Sources, (DMAS)” and the other one named “Databank of Databases (DADB)”. DMAS has 315 and DADB 151 entries. For a comprehensive description of the content of a data source we developed a thesaurus that contains key words including not only environmental but also health and workplace exposure aspects. In order to evaluate the utility of DMAS and DADB we used a test set of 68 chemicals. For these chemicals, we collected data on the parameter “detection in the environment” and stored them in a factual databank named “CHEM68”.
