On the challenge of creating and communicating air quality information: a case for environmental engineers

Building environmental information systems is a challenging task. It involves a detailed analysis of the addressee’s needs, development of air pollutant concentration assessment and interpretation techniques, which must be tailored to the addressee, as well as the development of information planning and production strategies. Environmental engineers are increasingly often in charge of setting up environmental services. They must be thus knowledgeable in a number of issues they did not face before. We present an air quality information system MARQUIS, which is usable, on the one hand, as a base service that can be extended and adapted to a new environmental information scenario, and, on the other hand, as a source of teaching and training material for environmental engineers.