Professor David Swayne
William Evans Visiting Fellow

David Swayne is Professor of Computing and Information Science, University
of Guelph.  He holds several adjunct appointments, one with the Computer
Systems Group at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has worked on
several projects since 1985 with Environment Canada. He has collaborated
with several Canadian and international agricultural, environmental and
human resources development agencies.

Title:  Issues of EIS Software Design

Abstract:  Experiences in designing and developing Environmental
Information Systems (EIS) are presented to identify important issues for
improving design concepts.  The lessons learned by the author and others
over the past decade are highlighted.  Environmental information systems
are problematic: the domain is at the same time broad and diffuse,
technology is not always uniformly accepted by the community (at least in
North America), data ownership is distributed, data are of uneven and
uncertain quality. At the same time, environmental application of computing
offers a rich raw material for student projects and theses. From very
simple projects that consist of straightforward data transformations or
visualizations, to the most complex that may involve such difficult
concepts as estimation, management and propagation of uncertainty in
reasoning systems, environmental computation is a veritable treasure-trove
of projects.  Our experiences with international student exchanges
involving environmental science and informatics students from four
institutions in Canada and four in the European Union (Germany, France and
Italy) have proved to us that this is a rewarding application area for
computer science.

When:  Friday, 1.00 pm, 31 July 1998
Where:	  Castle C