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VALIDATION EXISTING DATA IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY VERIFICATION PROGRAM
Citation:
Wasson*, S. VALIDATION EXISTING DATA IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY VERIFICATION PROGRAM. QUALITY ASSURANCE: GOOD PRACTICE, REGULATION, AND LAW. Taylor & Francis, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 7(4):201-206, (1999).
Description:
Establishing the credibility of existing data is an ongoing issue, particularly when the data sets are to be used for a secondary purpose, not the original reason for which they were collected. If the secondary purpose is similar to the primary purpose, the potential user may have little difficulty establishing credibility since the acceptance criteria for both purposes should be similar. If the secondary purpose is different, data credibility may be more difficult to establish because the experiment generating the data may not have been conducted optimally for the secondary purpose and, therefore, all of the necessary quality assurance data ("metadata") may not have been collected. In either case, a process will be required to determine the acceptability of the data.
At the time the U.S. EPA Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) was established, similar certification and verification programs run by states or foreign countries routinely used existing data sets for cost reasons rather than generate data by testing. Therefore, the issue of whether existing data could be used in the ETV program immediately surfaced. In response, the policy and process for addressing existing data were written and published in Appendix C of the ETV Quality Management Plan (Hayes et al., 1998). This paper will discuss how the ETV program determines the credibility of existing data offered to verify the performance of environmental technologies.