The data portals main function is to present a metadata catalog of geospatial information holdings and services. JNREDP will consist of a central catalog of metadata documents indexed by various means, including geographic components. The data providers will have mechanisms to publish their environmental data to the portal, and the data users will be able to access thsi centralized catalog to find candidate data sets or services for use. The users wil be able to view the metadata record of a specific data set, or may be able to connect directly to a specific source to further explore its suitability for their specific purposes. Visually, this would be done by the use of wms (web map service). This will allow dataproviders to have their own datasets on their own servers, something that would make the whole idea of updating maps easier. In figure 1, a pyramid is shown to illustrate how the main data portal i build by different wms servers, and connected to each wms server, there will also be metadata.