The NEPAccess Platform
Achievements
What we’ve built so far:
Enables users to:
How we’ve done it:
The most comprehensive cross-agency collection of EISs
✓ Quickly search one place to retrieve documents from 20+ agencies
(including EPA, FERC, BLM, FS, etc.)
✓ Collected data from agency APIs to ingest all available metadata and PDFs for each EIS.
✓ Curation of records and PDFs not available from EPA.
Only source with full-text search of PDFs
✓ Search full text of EIS documents that are hundreds of pages long within seconds rather than hours.
✓ Find more relevant results than on sites like EPA, which is searchable only by title or basic metadata.
✓ Tailor searches to specific research needs (e.g., similar actions, their alternatives, mitigation, and more).
✓ Converted all available PDFs to machine-readable text and data.
Linked all stages of EIS process (NOI throughw ROD)
✓ Retrieve and display all results related to a single process in one search, even when the title has changed.
✓ Analyze project timeline data and other patterns and trends related to project management and workflows.
✓ Used natural language processing (NLP) and manual verification to identify related document titles.
✓ Configured user interface (UI) to display related EIS records as a chronological group.
Enhanced project metadata
✓ Easily retrieve and analyze more relevant documents by narrowing searches to specific action types or decision types.
✓ Trained machine learning models to extract and generate new metadata for each document on 11 action types and 5 decision types.
Enhanced geographical metadata
✓ Use searchable map or geographical filter menu to narrow results (e.g., to a single county, or a group of neighboring counties or states).
✓ Trained machine learning model to extract state- and county-level location data from titles, basic metadata, and full-text documents.
✓ Automatically linked location data to map coordinates to populate searchable map interface.
