Database for environmental monitoring at nuclear facilities

To ensure that an assessment could be made of the impact of nuclear facilities on the local environment, a program of environmental monitoring must be established well in advance of nuclear facilities operation. Enormous amount of data must be stored and correlated starting with: location, meteorology, type sample characterization from water to different kind of food, radioactivity measurement and isotopic measurement (e.g. for C-14 determination, C-13 isotopic correction it is a must). Data modelling is a well known mechanism describing data structures at a high level of abstraction. Such models are often used to automatically create database structures, and to generate code structures used to access databases. This has the disadvantage of losing data constraints that might be specified in data models for data checking. Embodiment of the system of the present application includes a computer-readable memory for storing a definitional data table for defining variable symbols representing respective measurable physical phenomena. The definitional data table uniquely defines the variable symbols by relating them to respective data domains for the respective phenomena represented by the symbols. Well established rules of how the data should be stored and accessed, are given in the Relational Database Theory. The theory comprise of guidelines such as the avoidance of duplicating data using technique call normalization and how to identify the unique identifier for a database record. (author)