Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 404

reactive barriers for the passive treatment of contaminated groundwater enjoy higher
acceptance.
Many of the innovative environmental remedial technologies are discussed in
Volume 4 in detail. Some of them are as follows:

- In situ and ex situ biological remediation, bioventing, biosparging;

- Phytotechnologies;

- In situ and ex situ remediation of water and soil based on spontaneous or techno-

logically established chemical processes, firstly chemical oxidation using different
oxidizing agents and additives, as well as solvent extraction and multiphase
extraction;

- Soil vapor extraction, air sparging, air stripping;

- In situ flushing, washing and leaching soil contaminants;

- The application of groundwater circulating wells;

- The use of mobilizing agents such as surfactants, cosolvents or complexing agents

for the removal of contaminants from soil and sediment;

- Stabilization of contaminants in soil and sediment by using physical, chemical,

biological methods or their combination;

- Permeable reactive barriers;

- Electrokinetic contaminant removal;

- Thermal treatment.

The above-mentioned measures and soft remedial technologies can be applied not
only for restoring environmental health but also for maintaining the healthy status
quo. Ubiquity of such water- and soil-conserving technologies has been able to stop
the globally threatening deterioration of aquatic ecosystems and soil degradation.

9 DATA, INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL
DECISION MAKING

Environmental data and environmental information are frequently used as synonyms,
but there is a long way from gathering data to having useful information, which is
called information processing cycle.
Data are outputs of a sensing device or an organ of a living organism that include
both useful and irrelevant or redundant information and must be processed to make
them meaningful. Data is the plural of the Latin word “ datum ,'' meaning “given'',
something what is given without modification, manipulation, organization or process-
ing anyhow. Data may occur in visual and otherwise sensible forms or in numerical
or equivalent digital forms (letters, dates, digital images, etc.) that can be digitally
transmitted or processed.
Data mining or extraction is based on differentiation between useful and not nec-
essary/redundant information in a database. The result of this process is a dataset,
which can be further processed. It is important to correctly extract the required data
without errors. Extraction of necessary data from large datasets (DNA libraries or raw
data of satellites, etc.) may be done in a stepwise manner, e.g., starting with an aliquot