The first so-called superhighway application, Earth Data Systems, will be demonstrated at the UniForum ’94 show. The system was developed by the National Information Infrastructure Testbed, a non-profit-making industry-led consortium, comprising corporations, universities and US government agencies. These organisations are working under the US Government initiative, the National Data Superhighway or National Information Infrastructure. Earth Data System is a suite of environmental analysis applications, which are targeted at earth scientists and based on the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment. The product is designed to enable users, located in different places, to evaluate the effects of environmental change by accessing, analysing, modelling, and visualising historical and current information on the environment, as if they were sitting side by side. The Earth Data System information bank holds 20 years-worth of environmental records, including satellite images of land and oceans, weather statistics, coastline and river data, salinity levels and fishing yields, all gathered from large and small databases from a variety of public and private sources around the world.
