The objectives of OREIS are to maintain data that are complete, consistent, and fully qualified as to their usability; to provide ease of accessibility of environmental data that support environmental planning, analysis, and decision making; to facilitate the efficient access, reporting, analysis, display, mapping, import, and export of data; to minimize the uncertainties associated with data, data products, and interpretation of results by strictly controlling data input, revision, and storage; to ensure that metadata are available for establishing the legal defensibility of the data and data products; and to minimize duplicative costs to DOE for data collection, management, analysis, and reporting as contractor and subcontractor changes occur.

The scope of OREIS includes data supporting environmental restoration, compliance, and surveillance activities. Environmental data in OREIS include known quality measurement and spatial data from the following environmental media: groundwater, surface water, sediment, soil, air, and biota. The types of environmental data within OREIS include but are not limited to chemical, biological, ecological, radiological, geophysical, and lithological data. In addition to environmental measurement data, the OREIS data base contains extensive descriptive and qualifier metadata to help document data quality and to enable end users to analyze the appropriateness of the data for secondary uses. OREIS contains both validated and unvalidated data as determined by the originating organization. To ensure that the quality of the data is known, OREIS flags the data validation status. The scope does not include project-specific activities (e.g., sample tracking, field results data entry, equipment calibration records) or project control tools (e.g., cost accounting or milestone tracking) which are available through other computer systems.