EDAS2-Stories

EDAS2 Usage in the World

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:16:22 -0400

It's been some time since I've written and I wanted to post some notes about where things are with EDAS2.

There are a number of organizations (state agencies) around the country that are currently evaluating EDAS2 for production use. Please contact us if you are interested in coordinating with these agencies as we encourage everyone to pool their resources to save time and $$. EPA Region 7 is also evaluating using EDAS2 for data management and reporting. They have provided valuable feedback on their experience and find EDAS2 to be a very useful platform. They have noted some room for improvement and ways to make EDAS2 better. So we hope to be able incorporate these suggestions in a future release.

Also note that the state of New Mexico has adopted EDAS2 for internal water quality and biological data management. New Mexico is actively developing against EDAS2 and has agreed to share their improvements back to the project. Their improvements to date include enabling support for multiple users through the use of Seam Security (and the upgrade to Seam 2.1). They are currently implementing a number of other general and agency-specific improvements, and hopefully we will be able to post details about them here soon.

Also, please note that we have updated our Contributions section with a brief explanation of the process for submitting changes to the core EDAS2 project.

0.5 is Available

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:07:24 -0400

As promised we have posted the source code and everything you need to run this initial release of EDAS2.

This site should have everything that you need to run a local copy of EDAS2, including the database script files, database diagram, seed data, Java source code (for Java 5 and 6) and the installation instructions.

Note that the version we have posted here is the same as is running on our demonstration servers. This version also includes the example reverse-geocoding [2] request that looks up HUC8 when creating or editing a monitoring location. At this time this request points at a service provided from a Tetra Tech development server and is based on ArcGIS Server. The source code for this service is not available.

First release of EDAS2

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:11:18 -0500

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!

EDAS2 in the News

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:07:12 -0500

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

Just in time for the show

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:41:36 -0500

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].

0.5 Released

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:47:54 -0500

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.

0.2 Down, 0.3 to Go

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:10:59 -0400

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.

Covering the milestones

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:14:00 -0400

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:

Integration with Google Maps for Monitoring Location visualization, editing, creation [Done]
Limit data editing to User Organization - users may edit only their own data [Done]
Set Project at Activity [Done]
WQX 2.0 validation utility linked to UI - on screen feedback about data completeness for each record, data-level record flagging [Done]
EPA CDX-style data duplication prevention - data provided by other orgs will overwrite the same data within the data store [Done]
WQX 2.0 (core data elements) export support [Done]
Core lookup management (Organization, Projects, Characteristics, Taxa) [Done]
Bulk Results import from tabular data (Field measurements and Benthic only) [Done]
Data model changes to better support biological data [Done]

and version 0.2 is planned to provide these as well

Create and filter by Monitoring Location Groups, Status - Display in Map [In progress]
Display EPA Web Map Services (WMS) STORET stations, Water Layer, PCS, and HUCs [In progress]
Store images for Monitoring Locations, display through UI and Google Maps in map popup [In progress]
Create rich image manager for stations [In progress]
Simple taxa management controls [In progress]
WQX 2.0 (core data elements) bi-directional Node2 integration [In progress]

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).

Project is nearing a pre-alpha release

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:45:57 -0400

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.