Cris Ewing: Follow that fish: A data sharing success story

A talk at Plone Symposium East 2009. Track B, 2:30pm, May 29.

link to video

Around the Pacific Northwest, researchers from a variety of organizations are using hundreds of hydrophones to conduct research studies on movement patterns of aquatic animals. Each study is characterized by numerous tagged animals that move and a limited number of hydrophones that are located to address a significant question for individual programs. However, these tagged animals move over larger domains than individual organizations can cover. Researchers have recognized the value of coordinating placement of hydrophones to improve their coverage and address larger-scale management questions.

To facilitate this coordination, researchers needed the ability to efficiently share data collected across each-others hydrophone arrays. HyDRa--the Hydrophone Data Repository--has been created to provide a single, on-line data warehouse capable of serving this need.

HyDRa is a site built in plone that uses a hybrd database, part ZODB and part PostgreSQL, to store hydrophone and acoustic tag data and provide research-oriented views of that data. This talk will cover the genesis of the HyDRa project, the special problems that required our using both the ZODB and a relational database, and the techniques used to achieve this hybridization. We will talk in particular about the uses of SQLAlchemy and associated packages and the Archetypes SQLStorage. The talk will be of interest to developers and integrators.