ABSTRACT
Throughout history, weather has played a major role in all aspects of human endeavour including the outcome of wars and battles. The evolution of capacity to monitor and predict the climate has been enabled through advances in information and communication technologies. Advances in decades have had a profound impact on societies, transforming many to knowledge-based economies where the ability to integrate disparate information is central to making more effective decisions. The rapidly developing internet was quickly exploited by initiatives, such as the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, designed to enable prompt reporting of disease outbreaks. Prior to the turn of the millennium the majority of research articles were published in hard copy by scholarly societies for their members and accessed by students and researchers via university libraries; a service severely limited in many developing countries.
