About the ChemAlliance News Web Service

Purpose

The ChemAlliance News web service provides machine-readable versions of the news content found in ChemAlliance. This service is designed to make it easy for ChemAlliance partners to provide regularly updated news on their web sites, without incurring the cost of maintaining an in-house news clipping service. Currently this service is provided free of charge, but requires prior permission from ChemAlliance.

ChemAlliance news focuses on items of interest to environmental managers in the chemical manufacturing and distribution industry, as well as technical assistance providers who work with these industries. Typical news items include workshop and conference announcements, regulatory updates, announcements of new regulatory, compliance assistance, or pollution prevention tools and software, and related items which deal with effective environmental management in the target industries. ChemAlliance news is collected on an ongoing basis from a variety of sources, including the US EPA Federal Register Announcements and program offices, state and regional regulatory agencies, chemical industry trade associations, and business wire services. Each item is reviewed for relevance by ChemAlliance staff and edited for use prior to publication. If you have an item you'd like to submit for consideration, you can use our online feedback form to bring it to the attention of our staff.

Who's Using the ChemAlliance News Service?

The ChemAlliance news web service is available for use by any technical assistance provider (including federal, state and local governmental programs, NGO’s and for-profit companies) which serves the chemical process and chemical distribution industries. There is no fee for use by approved assistance providers, but prior permission is required from ChemAlliance and is subject to specific terms of use. Permission to re-use this content can be obtained by contacting ChemAlliance (contact information provided below).

Sites which are currently using the ChemAlliance news web service are listed below.

Table 1. Web Sites Using ChemAlliance News
	SectorSTAR (short for Industry Sector-based Environmental Strategies, Tools, and Resources) is an online service designed to encourage and support improved environmental performance by businesses and industries. The web site provides easy access to information on federal, state, and privately-run environmental programs for industries. SectorSTAR features tools and resources, articles detailing the environmental and economic achievements of industry leaders, access to state and local assistance programs and information, upcoming environmental events, and more. SectorSTAR uses ChemAlliance news as part of it's Batch and Specialty Chemicals sector resources.
	The AssistanceCenters.NET site is the portal to EPA's Sector-based Compliance Assistance Centers. The Assistance Centers program (which includes ChemAlliance) is comprised of partnerships with between EPA, industry, academic institutions, environmental groups, and other agencies, designed to address real world issues in language that speaks to the regulated community. The AssistanceCenters.NET site uses a news feed from ChemAlliance as part of it's news content.
	The National Environmental Compliance Assistance Clearinghouse was developed by the US EPA and its partners. It is your guide to compliance information on the Internet. It provides quick access to compliance tools, contacts, and planned activities from across the EPA as well as other compliance assistance providers. It also allows the users to interact with the US EPA and others through a variety of interactive features.

Terms of Use

Prior to using the ChemAlliance news web service, you must obtain a user ID, which is used to help us measure the reach of our news content.

We encourage creative or innovative use of the news content we provide through this site. However, we do impose the following conditions:

you may not charge a fee or subscription to your users for this information. You may use this content on a fee-based website, but only in areas open to all users.
you must credit ChemAlliance as the source of the news, and provide a link back to the ChemAlliance site somewhere on the page where the news is displayed.
"high traffic" sites may be asked to cache a copy of the news on their server in order to accomodate the limitations of our server.

If you have any questions about these terms, or would like to obtain a user ID so that you can begin using the web service on your site, you should contact Scott Butner (scott.butner@pnl.gov), Director of ChemAlliance. You may reach Scott via telephone at (509)-372-4946.

Using the Service - Technical Documentation

The ChemAlliance news web service provides a machine readable feed of its news stories for re-publication. News content is available in any of the following formats:

Comma Separated Variable format
Envirosense Tagging Standard format (HTML format)
Rich Site Summary (RSS) ver 2.0
WDDX

Other formats may be added in the future, so if you require a specific format, please contact us so we can discuss your needs.

The ChemAlliance news service requires that several user-provided parameters be included in the page request. These parameters allow the service to filter and format the news appropriately, and allow us to maintain some control over who accesses the service. These parameters may be sent via either the HTTP POST or GET methods. The full list of parameters is described below.

Description of Parameters

Table 2. Parameters Used in ChemAlliance News web service Note: Parameters marked with an asterisk _* are required.
METHOD *	A string value indicating which web service method is being requested by the user. Two values are currently supported: ABOUT Returns the documentation for the web service (this page). GETNEWS Returns news items filtered and formatted per the optional parameters. The default value is "ABOUT"
USER_ID *	String value assigned to your organization by ChemAlliance. Requests which do not include a user ID will be ignored. To obtain a user ID, please contact Scott Butner (scott.butner@pnl.gov), Director of ChemAlliance.
SEARCH_TEXT	String value used to specify one or more search terms which must be contained in the news item or headline. Multiple terms are "OR'ed" together, and the search is not case sensitive. Search terms should be URL encoded to remove illegal characters (such as spaces) which cannot be transmitted in the URL. Users may also take advantage of ChemAlliance's advanced search syntax, which allows you to craft more selective searches to pinpoint the news you want to use. See the discussion below for more information on how to specify advanced search strings.
FORMAT	A string value indicating one of the allowed formats. Allows the user to specify the format which will be used to return the data. Currently the following formats are supported: Comma Separated Variable (CSV). Field values are included as the first row. This format is supported by Cold Fusion queries, and many commercial spreadsheet and database products. This is the default format. Envirosense News Standard (HTML). This is a "style sheet friendly" HTML format, developed as a standard by the P2Rx organization in collaboration with the National P2 Roundtable. News items are returned using extensions to the HTML markup language, and can be displayed "as is" or in combination with a style sheet. Rich Site Summary (RSS), ver 1.0 . A full XML implementation of the RSS 1.0 standard. WDDX. The WDDX format is an application of XML employed by many Cold Fusion developers. We export data in Cold Fusion recordset format, making it compatible with the CFQUERY syntax and features for accessing the data.
ADDED_SINCE	Date value indicating the range of news items to return. The date should be in the format "YYYY-MM-DD" (without the quotes). The default behavior is to return all news items which are considered by ChemAlliance staff to be "current" -- typically this is 30 days from the date the news item was first posted, but this value may be extended or reduced depending upon the nature of the news.
MAX_ITEMS	An integer number specifying the maximum number of news items to be returned. The default value is 10 items.
TOPIC	String value which is used to specify one or more ChemAlliance Topics. These topics can be used to restrict the news to specific subject matter areas. If this parameter is not included, all news items which meet the remaining criteria will be included in the results.
NEWS_TYPE	String value which allows the user to specify one or more allowable News Types, from which results will be selected. The allowable values of the NEWS_TYPE parameter include one or more of the following options: NEWS Items include regulatory updates, summaries of chemical industry news, and other items of interest to the industry. CALENDAR Items typically include training events, conferences, and workshops, but may also include deadlines for regulatory submissions, comment periods, etc. WEBSITE Items are typically announcements or brief summaries of new online resources of interest to the industry. The default behavior is to return all news types.

Advanced Search Features

The optional SEARCH_TEXT parameter allows users to select only those news stories which contain selected words. For example, including the phrase "&SEARCH_TEXT=P2" in your query will find only those news items containing the acronym "P2" in either the headline or story. Words which are separated by spaces are "OR'ed" together -- that is, selected news items will contain at least one of the terms, but not necessarily all of them.

Users wishing to exert more precise control over the selection of stories can create more complex search strings by using the advanced search operators listed in Table 3. These operators allow you to specify which field the text must be located in, to "AND" words together (e.g., forcing BOTH words to appear in the document) and to specify complete phrases.

Table 3. Advanced Search Features Available in SEARCH_TEXT Parameter

+, [AND] Logical "AND" forces both terms to be present in selected items. For example, "SEARCH_TERM=Pollution [AND] Prevention"
requires both pollution and prevention to be present.

-, [NOT] Logical negation - that is, term following must NOT appear in the selected items. For example,

[OR] Logical "OR" of adjacent terms -- this is the default, so the [OR] operator is provided for completeness only.

HEADLINE:searchterm Restricts the search to the Headline field.

STORY:searchterm Restricts the search to the body of the news story.

CONTRIBUTOR:searchterm Restricts the search to the contributor field.

KEYWORDS:searchterm Restricts the search to the keyword field. Note that most ChemAlliance news items do not use this field, which is provided for compatibility with future plans.

"searchterm" Enclosing the search term in quotes forces a search for an exact match, including any embedded spaces.

A Simple Example

The following form allows you to generate a sample querystring (which would normally be sent to the news web service) and will display the resulting data that will be returned.