Projects Report

It feels like I’ve been working really hard since I got back from Shallow Survey (and I have the carpel tunnel syndrome to prove it). Here is an update on my projects which I sent to EJ.

Digital DR

We've been in the process of mapping out the project, given the decision to use the XForms standard as the primary technology behind the project. XForms essentially allows one to use a formalized metadata definition (which we have already created to correspond to DRs) to easily go between some input interface and the metadata instance document. We have been comparing providers for XForms technology. IBM came in and gave a sales pitch for their proprietary Lotus Forms product (and then we got a price estimate from them), and I've been investigating Orbeon XForms, an open source project with a very vibrant user community that also offers support contracts and custom programming for companies and governement agencies. I had a good phone call with one of the Orbeon engineers and was very encouraged that Orbeon could meet most of the goals of the project. Today the group met and we essentially decided to:

• Purchase a small set (five or less) of copies of IBM's Form Builder with which metadata mangers can create XForms.
• Use Orbeon Forms Server to serve up forms to HSD/ships/branches and buy a support contract to make sure that it goes smoothly.
• Use Firefox/IE+Google Gears on the client side for HSD/ships/branches to get/submit forms John Tucker is going to get a trial copy of Lotus Forms builder (to test before we buy) and Rob Downs is going to help me with the procurement procedure for our Orbeon support contract. Jeremy and I are working with Kyle to set up a test project for this spring sometime (and probably hydropolooza if it happens). This project is moving... which is exciting, because at times it has been difficult to make a project about metadata fun

  Sound Speed Uncertainty

  This project has been rolling full steam ahead ever since our marathon meeting at Shallow Survey. Jonathan Beaudoin, Brian Calder, and I have been e-mailing trying to hone our definition of the uncertainty wedge, the structure that we will use to describe the uncertainty over the complete sounding space. Jonathan has put together an abstract and skeleton paper for USHC that Brian and I have put in comments on. I've been doing a lot of coding and refactoring on the ESS program that had written for Gretchen, trying to make it more of a general sound speed analysis tool (rather than the simple targeted calculator that it is now). This will include visualization of all the component profiles (salinity/conductivity, temperature) and visualization of the uncertainty wedges such as were displayed in some slides on Jonathan's Shallow Survey presentation. I'm thinking that if I can get some of the good visualization/analysis tools coded up in the next couple of months, it may make a good demo for field procedures workshop in January.

  AIS-based Survey Planning

  I met with Kyle and Tim Maclaughlin last week. They arranged to have Kyle's Coast Guard AIS feed logged directly to one of their windows servers. In June I had written a shell script for Kyle and wrap some of Kurt Schwehr's code and automatically convert Kyle's AIS feed to a csv file. Tim requested that I convert the shell script to python so that they can easily run it on their window server, and automatically convert that data at log time. I have done that and responded to Kyle's request to (in the mean time) convert a month's worth of data (September 08) for him.

  fetchtides

  Released version 2.4 on 10/8/08 (installer on the ocs ftp site). The primary new feature in version 2.4 is support for fetching arbitrarily long data blocks (i.e. I abstracted out CO-OPS's requirement of data queries being less than 31 days). -----