U.S. environmental regulations require the collection, statistical evaluation, and reporting of data associated with ground-water monitoring at hazardous waste facilities. Desktop personal computers are capable of managing the large volume of data and automatically generating the required reports. A functional data base for ground-water monitoring data has been developed for the Apple II personal computer. Design emphasis was placed on error-checking during data entry and on simplicity and consistency of all operations available to the user. This should be considered an integral part of quality assurance/quality control considerations, not only throughout the operations of sampling and chemical and physical measurements, but also throughout all operations involving data entry, storage, manipulation, and reporting.

The programming language used in data base development (a structured BASIC) was chosen to facilitate testing and debugging of program modules. A major design objective was to assure that all operations involved in entry, storage, manipulation, and statistical evaluation of data are well-documented and “bug-free.”