Fossgis: datadiver data warehouse validation - Hans Plum¶

Tags: fossgis, geo, rest

“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.