“Diver” stands for “Digging Investigation Viewing Exporting Reporting”. They have lots of data. They deal with lots of sea measurements: wreck positions, sand bank movements, environmental measurement data.
They use a web interface to step through the data. The users click through the data, searching it, investigating it.
They use a REST-based architecture. REST: you have an information model and separate from that, the representation. You have some data collection with a URL. You can then request various representations like tabular, picture, csv. This is the “viewing” part.
What they do often is cutting through the data. Draw a line on the map and generate a picture with the water temperature at various depths along that line. Or show the lowest water temperature in a grid. This way, it is a good tool for analysis.
Behind the scenes they use UMN mapserver for the map rendering. They have some problems with data sources: you have to do too many preparation on ESRI shapefiles before giving them to the mapserver, for instance. They’re working on an open source tool that makes this simpler.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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