GENIE: a global environmental network for information exchange

Future policy decisions concerning global environ mental change (GEC) will be influenced, increasingly, by data and research collated from the physical and social sciences. The GENIE project addresses the imperative needs of GEC researchers to identify, locate, retrieve and process relevant datasets and associated information which are distributed in Data Centres and Archives, and, further, to exchange per sonal or domain-related perspectives of the datasets. The provision of appropriate facilities is an endeavour with impli cations for the combined disciplines of computer and informa tion science.