Geo-information systems modeling for environmental research applications.

A growing movement has emerged to question the role of agricultural legislation in promoting practices that contribute to social problems. Today this movement for sustainable agriculture is garnering increasing support and acceptance taking broad themes of interdisciplinary study to run specific analyses under a well-defined approach. In this sense, we to run specific analyses under a well-defined approach. In this sense, we can observe an increasing demand of geo-information systems (GIS) that serves as a simple and effective tool for questioning, understanding, and integration of different contexts in policy making. However, the technology offered is usually genric and cannot support alone all requirements of environmental models. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Organization - EMBRAPA has, over the past twenty-two years, generated and adapted most of the technologies, products and services for the Brazilian agribusiness complex searching for rational practices on farming and forest extraction. However, a strong compromise with high productivity levels was driven and sponsored by federal policies. Anew organization paradigm set environmental quality as priority guiding current and future research agendas. At EMBRAPA/CNPS - National Center for Soil Research, researchers have been involved in new interdisdiciplinary projects where concepts and methods from the soil classification and its suitability interpretations recognizes the importance and complexity of customize such generic tools for sustainable agriculture applications. For this reason, this paper wants to present a project that concentrates proposals of specific research actions into a complex shell of geo-information system customization, having as start point the technical cooperation between EMBRAPA and INPE (Brazilian Spatial Research Institute) for development of the object-oriented GIS called SPRING. The project on geo-information system modelling for environmental research applications has been coordinated by the CNPS, in association with other research institutions as IME (Army Engineering Institute), Institute of Mathematics at UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro Federal University), EMBRAPA/CPAC (Agricultural Research Center for Cerrado Ecosystem), and EMBRAPA/CNPTIA (Center for Research of Information Technology in Agriculture). The prime objective of the project is to develop and supply methods and products of geo-information related to both single thematic data organization and interrelationship among entities from different domains, whose are components of EMBRAPA's environmental data set.