MANIR has been actively involved in Internet / Intranet development since the beginning of this way of communication. Dusan Sakulski (October 1995) has done one of the very first Internet pages, for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF). Dusan was, also, initiator of the DWAF's Intranet. Basic idea was to design a DWAF (corporate) "operating system". Presently, MANIR is involved into design and implementation of the Emergency and Disaster Management Centre (EDMC) at DWAF Intranet page.

To be able to do all of that, we are capable to use a variety of software applications. The best way to present them is to classify them based on certain phases of the web design and implementation:

• MATHEMATICA (Wolfram), GSharp (AVS), FORTRAN
• CGI (Perl)
• ...

Picture says more than thousand words! On the daily basis more and more institutions and organisations accept visual way to send the message around the world. Even more, if those messages are "related to certain place on the map", or, how we say "geo-referenced", than better! That is main reason why they accepted GIS as tools to support their management decisions. In the year 1985, when we started with GIS, members of MANIR had been able to have gut feeling about it, only. But, that was good gut feeling. For the past fourteen years we have been involved into a lot of local, regional, national and international projects involving GIS, as a one of the most important tools to enable proper decisions making support.

We do not have intention to count all of the projects we have included GIS, but let us highlight some of them:

1998-present: Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) and Department of Constitutional Development (DCD) Emergency and Disaster management centre (EDMC). The most important component to decision maker, if one talks about potential or existing natural or man-made disasters, is the quick and very visual information where disaster happened? Very first questions are "Where it was? Show me on the map? How many people have been affected? How far are surrounding communities? In this moment, only GIS can give all those answers, quickly. And, what is the most important, those answers can be immediately seen on the screen, printed or plotted on the paper, or sent by E-mail or fax, or attached to the Web page (Internet / Intranet)!

1995- 1998: Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) - Implementation of GIS as a tool to support complex and integrated decision making process for the Water Services projects (former Community Water Supply and Sanitation project - CWSS). On the beginning of that project, importance of the visual information was highly significant. Having a lot of presentations and meetings with regional and local institutions, way to "show" to them where are existing water schemes (infrastructure), where are communities, what is reliability of the water resources, and so on and so on, was GIS. Equally, on the computer screen as well as printed on the map (paper). Presently, after more than four years, and a thousand new water project has been approved, role of the GIS is, even, more significant.