We have been getting a lot of interest from folks wanting to “kick the tires” after a successful webinar demonstrating some of the key aspects of EDAS2 (see embedded slide show below).

So, this announcement is for all of you who want to run EDAS2 within your own environments. Our target for our first source release is March 16. This release will contain all the sources needed to run EDAS2 and wiki-based documentation for deploying it. We are planning to make the sources available through the Sourceforge site (https://sourceforge.net/projects/edas2/)

So watch this space for the final announcement!

Want to know more about the technology underneath EDAS2?

Read this article by Dan Allen (and then read his book Seam in Action). Dan was instrumental in the early days of EDAS2 and he provided a lot of great performance tuning which we hope will be useful to all Seam developers.

Speed up your Data-Driven JSF/Seam Application by Two Orders of Magnitude - Part 1

We have posted some updated slides below in case you missed the web cast. You may chose to expand the slides into their own window for easier viewing. Click the image below or click [here].

The EDAS2 Project continues forward and since I posted last we have released versions 0.4 and 0.5 for preview. These versions introduced a lot of new functionality, but I’d like to highlight a few of my favorite additions here.

To streamline the user experience we’ve included modifications to the detailed results management screens that provide the user only with fields that are relevant to the type of activity they are working with. For example, there are dedicated screens for the management of sediment, fish, habitat, tissue, and plankton samples.

We have also included a many more lookup administration screens, as well as additional import/export capabilities such as a tabular station importer, and the ability to import and export WQX 2.0 XML straight from EDAS2 (without needing a Node).

But as a GIS guy my favorite new addition is the ability for EDAS2 to call a Reverse Geocoding (RG) service to populate geographic fields of a monitoring location. For example, when a user creates a station, EDAS2 will now call an RG service and automatically populate the HUC8 field of the Monitoring Location. Of course there was not a reliable RG service available for HUCs so we also crafted our own RG service based on ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to support our needs.

In summary, EDAS2 is shaping up to become a very usable platform for managing and sharing your environmental data.

As always, if you can find more information about the changes to EDAS2 at the Roadmap http://www.edas2.com/dokuwiki/doku.php/roadmap

If you find these items interesting and want to learn more, please contact us through the information at the left of the page. If you want to chat about EDAS2 and offer some of your ideas and thoughts, feel free to sign up for an account with this site and post your thoughts on the forum.

We made up a little ground with the last release and conducted the internal release of 0.2 today -- a little earlier than planned. Check out the roadmap to see the covered features.

Unfortunately the discussion rages about how we handle biological data in the database. We are trying to balance usability issues with the desire to maintain cross-organization exhange of bio data. Unfortunately, an elegant solution to cover both gracefully is so far elusive. Stay tuned for updates.

But, not wanting to reduce our momentum, we have an internal draft list of features that will we'll be implementing for 0.3 perhaps even by November 1! Again, watch the roadmap as we will post the proposed features there very soon. Progress marches on.

Work is continuing as planned and version 0.1 was released for internal testing late last week. With a few more bug fixes to run down we're going to keep marching along to achieve the first stable version in the coming weeks. Now that we have many foundational aspects of the project completed, we are making faster and faster progress laying in the enhancements.

The next milestone will be version 0.2 with the proposed features listed below. At 0.2 we will likely put our pencils down and it will be the last release until we can get some comment, suggestions and support from users.

As a round up, version 0.1 brought us the following features:

Be sure to watch the Roadmap for upcoming advances and try out the link above to take the latest versions for a spin. As always, post your comments and thoughts into the forum (requires registration with this site).

After being in the works for more months than we care to count, the project is progressing quickly and is nearing a pre-alpha release. We're pretty excited, though tempered—this is a pre-alpha. We will soon make a public demonstration available from this site. We hope that those who use it and will skip over to the forums to provide feedback and suggestions.

This release is intended to demonstrate the ability to simply populate the three core entities Monitoring locations, Activities, Results with valid data for field measurements and benthic macroinvertebrates. The pre-alpha will also offer basic data extraction and a simple report that demonstrates calculating a limitied set of biological metrics.

This release will also be able to demonstrate bidirectional exchange of WQX XML (v.1) data with another sister system, in this case, through a NEIEN second-generation, open source node http://sourceforge.net/projects/cgiexchangenetw/. This is an exciting development, and we hope to be able to tackle adding support for WQX2 in the near future.