Sunday 27 May 2012

KEY TECHNOLOGIES & KEY FEATURES

What is the most important piece of technology being used?

The most important piece of technology being used is the oceanographic model (SHOC), together with particle tracking techniques. The model runs simulations with observational input data to generate data-sets which can be further used and interpreted in MARVLIS. More information about the techniques and models can be found in http://www.csiro.au/connie2/.

What will require the most development effort and why?

The most development effort will be in the SHOC model. The current software only supports archived data and therefore further development is required to make the model accept real-time data.

What features are the most important to gain customer satisfaction and buy-in?

First of all, MARVLIS provides researchers with the infrastructure of MARVL for regional integrated marine studies and embedded tools to aid in environmental assessment. Secondly, the local community will benefit from having a tool to aid management and assessment of the Derwent Estuary, and the national community will benefit from the extensions to MARVL that this project will add. Lastly, the institutions involved will benefit from having tools and products it can use in future projects.


Non-functional requirements

MARVLIS will be built on standards (e.g. Open Geospatial Consortium) and is an open-source project.  All data-sets will be interoperable and metadata will be published to Research Data Australia. There will be different levels of data availability for different groups of users, with the security policy determined by the governing body. Source code will be available through Google Code http://code.google.com/p/marine-virtual-laboratory-information-system/.

Architectural Diagram

Architectural Diagram

MARVLIS will be built from components using a service-oriented architecture. All model outputs will be stored in a THREDDS server and can be accessed through the OPENDAP protocol, with metadata  harvested in GeoNetwork. Map layers will be served via the WMS protocol using GeoServer, from a PostgreSql database. The web server component uses Python and the Django web framework with a PostgreSql/PostGIS database, while the front end is built using Javascript with the OpenLayers mapping framework.

Links for technologies that will be used:

GeoNetwork: http://geonetwork-opensource.org/
Thredds: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/
PostgreSql: http://www.postgresql.org/
PostGIS: http://postgis.refractions.net/
OPENDAP: http://www.opendap.org/
WMS: http://www.opengeospatial.org/
Python: http://www.python.org/
Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/
OpenLayers: http://openlayers.org/


How the development team works together?

The project will use Agile approach to develop the final product. The project manager will act as scrum master for the development team. Weekly or fortnightly sprint will be used and regularly face to face or video conference meetings will be setup accordingly. Regularly peer to peer code view will be used to ensure all programming codes match the coding standard. Because it is very difficult to get final product users to participate in the development process, the steering committee will act on behalf of end users and is the voice of customers. The steering committee will guide the development process and to ensure the final product is up to the requirements.