Facility registry system

The Facility Registry System

The Facility Registry System (FRS) is a centrally managed Environmental Protection Agency database that identifies facilities, sites or places of environmental interest. FRS creates high-quality, accurate, and authoritative facility identification records through rigorous verification and management procedures that incorporate information from program national systems, state master facility records, data collected from EPA's Central Data Exchange registrations and data management personnel. The FRS provides Internet access to a single integrated source of comprehensive (air, water, waste and enforcement activities) environmental information about facilities, sites or places. [http://www.epa.gov/enviro/html/fii/index.html]

The FRS responds to the increasing demand for access to high quality information and the public need for one source of comprehensive environmental information about a given place on the earth. Under the statutes that created the EPA, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA, etc., there was no mandate for the individual programs to pool their data to create complete pictures of a facility's environmental footprint.

In 1995, the Risk Management Plans were compiled with the Toxics Release Inventory Data to create thefirst version of the Facility Registry System. Since that time, 38 states and 18 programs have been integrated into the FRS.

FRS Business Rules

The FRS retrieves key identifiers from program offices. Information includes facility name, address, city, etc. The FRS also ingests any geographic information, such as latitude and longitude. The program system id number is also retrieved. The information from the various programs are then parsed to remove abbreviations and colloquialisms in order to be compared using a conservative matching algorithm. Matched ids are clustered under a single FRS id, while unmatched ids are given individual ids. Geographic information is stored in a separate Location Reference Table. FRS ids that lack a latitude and longitude are sent through the EPA's Geocoding process, which uses rooftop and map interpolation methods to derive a latitude and longitude with the appropriate method, accuracy and description (MAD) codes.

Accessing the FRS

The FRS is available through an EPA's website called the [http://www.epa.gov/enviro Envirofacts Data Warehouse] . Facilities can be queried in tabular format, with active links to program databases that contain regulatory data. In addition to tabular displays, a Geospatial platform is incorporated so the public can [http://www.mapforums.com/virtual-earth-epa-envirofacts-6715.html view FRS data over the internet.]

Criticisms of the FRS

The role the FRS plays in the EPA is as an accurate, authoritative facility record. The European model of environmental regulation is for facilities to be assigned a number when the plant created, and all permits are linked to that number. The American system has disparate program office, Office of Water, Office of Air, etc. contributing their separate permit information to a central system, which has to match based on the business rules outlined above. Further complicating the issue, many programs use self reported information, which encourages gaming the system to reduce the apparent environmental impact of a production facility. These structural problems prevent the EPA from having as complete a picture of American pollution as its European counterparts. Another criticism of the FRS is the limited accuracy of the latitude and longitude.

References

1. O'Leary, Rosemary et al. "Managing For the Environment"San Francisco CA, Jossey-Bass 1999.

2. http://www.epa.gov/enviro/html/frs_demo/new_docs.html

3. http://www.mapforums.com/virtual-earth-epa-envirofacts-6715.html