The India Environment Portal represents an effort to provide a comprehensive, open, virtual information resource centre to promote informed decision-making and environmentally sustainable practices. It brings together a vast repository of information resources on environment, including news, feature articles, opinions, data, reports and documents, book abstracts, and links to institutions and government bodies.
A key feature of the portal is its use of a comprehensive thesaurus of more than 7000 environmental and geographic terms. All information in the portal is manually tagged using these keywords, which allow users to track each resource not just by the subject but where it is located and who is the agent involved.
A key purpose of the portal is to aggregate, organise and make public much of the information on environment that is regularly produced by research institutions, government bodies, NGOs, universities, the mass media, and experts, among others. Developed as a people’s portal, this initiative aims to actively collate and exchange data, research and information from people working in the field, in campaigns, in scientific institutions, in research and in industry. The green directory, for instance, identifies key institutions working in the field of environment and serves as a gateway to such institutions by linking to their websites. Over time, these institutions will, we hope, become joint collaborators and partners so that their issues are also highlighted and disseminated.
People look not just for pieces of information but overviews on the critical issues as well as updated information on latest developments, policies and resources. Together with news and events, the portal features an indepth section, with backgrounders, analysis and other resource materials on specific subjects.
In order to facilitate public access to environmental information, the massive resources of the Centre for Science and Environment have been made public in the first phase of the portal's development. This includes the entire archive of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth – roughly 40,000 researched articles. These in-depth articles were earlier available only to subscribers of the magazine. The portal has applied for all Center for Science & Environment -related content in the portal to be copyrighted under the Creative Commons license.
1 comment:
It is such a great initiative. Do you already know India Goes Solar (http://indiagoessolar.com/)? It is also a portal, but for clients and common people interested in solar energy. Their mission is to give information about the renewable sector in India and, simultaneously, help you find solar installers nearby. Their content portal is called ABC of Solar (http://abcofsolar.com/) and has posts about many subjects. Thank you!
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