Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) were inspired to build an environment portal as part of the push for portal development from the National Knowledge Commission, Govt. of India. CSE decided to release 20 years of their research articles spread over 3 proprietary systems, including a Library Management System, a Content Management System written in ASP/MS-SQL for managing the website of their premier Science and Environment magazine - Down to Earth (DTE) - and some Access Databases. The total number of records exceeded 300,000.
CSE also had a very extensive tag vocabulary, or thesaurus, of their library tags, organized as What, Where and Who lists, which represented nature of articles, geographies they represented, and people they were associated with including the authors, respectively. All the articles in its library and DTE database had been classified tagged with these.