3. the eea grundwater quality and quantity monitoring database

3. The EEA Groundwater Quality and Quantity Monitoring Database

3.1. Database description

The objective of Task 4 of activity MW2-1 was to "collect and collate, into a database, information on groundwater quality and quantity" using data and information provided within the MW2 questionnaires.

The Database was designed using MS-Access for rapid application development (prototyping). The final version of the database will be a Digital Vax/VMS rdb database for save and fast data access.

The blue print of the database is a shown below in a entity relationship diagram.

Figure 1 Simplified entity relationship diagram

Questionnaire description:
Information about the headings of the questionnaires, e.g. country-code, state of work or date of receipt.

Country description:
Translation between country-code (abbreviated country name) and long version of the country name.

Question description:
Every question of each questionnaire is coded with a hierarchical unique number.

Quality and Quantity Values:
Information about the contents of the questionnaires (part iii quality and part iv quantity)

Organisation Values:
Information about organisations involved within the different monitoring systems.

A lot of work-tables are created for quick handling of reports.

3.2. Data Entry

3.2.1. Questionnaire data

The data of the questionnaires where entered manually into MS-Excel spreadsheets to make reports available as soon as possible for the MW3 tasks (network design) of the ETC/IW 1995. The preparation of the spreadsheets facilitated the later on loading procedures onto a relational database. Textual answers caused great problems to convert these data into structured form. As a consequence it may be useful to for the further questionnaire design to provided more coded answer fields (e.g. multiple choice) in state of textual description fields.

3.3. Data Export

The data export will be available in CSV format. This format allows a data transfer via internet without any converting and an easy import in standard PC-application (e.g. Excel).