Water Information System for Europe WISE

The scanned map sheets are geo-referenced at the moment and are made available on a CD-ROM and as a web mapping service in 2008, to underpin the Water Information System for Europe (WISE). 

Article 16 also states that the list of priority substances needs to be reviewed by the Commission every four years. Eor the definition of the first list of priority substances, in accordance with the provisions of the WED, a Combined Monitoring-based and Modelling-based Priority Setting scheme (COMMPS) was devised. The implementation of this scheme also involved a data collection exercise to assess the level of contamination by chemical substances in Europe. This led to the development of the COMMPS monitoring database. But this was a one-off exercise (the database was never updated) and it was therefore recognised as fundamental that a data collection process should be carried out on a regular basis, with data to be included in the Water Information System for Europe (WISE) developed under the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS). 

However, it became clear that in order to better implement for policy purposes the impressive amount of data and results originated from European projects in FP5 and FP6, a targeted action at the science-policy interface would be necessary. The effort first put in place by the HARMONI-CA project, and later by SPI-WATER, led to the establishment of the research portal of the Water Information System for Europe, WISE-RTD, but additional effort is needed to make this interface work at its best and exploit all the existing potential of EC-funded research. 

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