ExView: A Real-time Experiment Browser used for SW06 Cruise Collaboration

1. ExView: A Real-time Experiment Browser used for SW06 Cruise Collaboration Andrew Maffei, Steve Lerner, Art Newhall, Cindy Sellers, Laura Stolp, John Kemp, Jim Akens (WHOI) Scott Glenn and team (Rutgers) SW06 Meeting, San Diego January 31, 2006

2. SW06 Logistics App. Goals • Help to make sure vehicles don’t run over moorings or each other. • Provide a common view for all participants of a multi-disciplinary, multi-vehicle, multi-PI experiment. • Provide a way to distribute Internet-based information to all ships (even those without SATCOM) • Provide a way to easily communicate information between ships • Provide a way for shore and ship based staff to monitor experiment status. • Provide a historical archive of experiment that can be built upon during post-experiment collaboration

3. ExView: How we did it • Latte as prototype • ExView: Custom webapp built for this experiment (using WHOI 4DGeoBrowser Tech) • Shore-based webserver mining Internet resources • Dedicated, synchronized laptops, hosting a mirrored website, was installed on each ship • Ship wireless network using SATCOM and WiFi • Supportive science and shipboard staff during design and implementation • Dedicated support staff on shore during ops • Luck

4. ExView Main Screen Features • Logistics Map • Integrated Logistics Data • Cruise Archive • Date/Time Browsing • Environmental Data • Map Display • Ship/Glider Tracks • Mooring Locations • Report Viewers & Summaries • New: Integration of post-cruisedata products and views for data analysis purposes

5. ExView Daily Reports

6. ExView Daily Reports

7. 17 apps at 4dgeo.whoi.edu

8. Synchronized Laptops • Refurbished, “cookie-cutter” laptops that are easily replaced when they fail. • Linux, Apache, Rsync are workhorses • 2 Ethernet connections for each laptop • Installed SWAP and Serial/Ethernet converters (for GPS) where necessary • Configured rsync in a restricted manner • All directories have only one author • Shore ExView: Cgi-bin, html, and data directories • Ship ExView: toshore/from-oceanus, toshore/from-knorr, … • No files deleted • RSYNC IS SIMPLY MAGIC

9. SW06 wireless data network 1.5 Gbytes in 3 months = 1550bps

10. Dedicated Support Staff • Cindy Sellers on shore • Steve and Andy as backup • Hand holding of information suppliers and ship/shore information viewers • Noticed when things did not seem to be going quite right (from science perspective) • Provided sense of humor and a positive attitude

11. Luck • SWAP stayed up on site even though there were many problems with it at dock • 2 HiSeasNet ships meant connectivity to Internet was usually available via one or other • Rsync better than we expected • No huge files were sent during SW06 (we discouraged its use for data files -- send matlab plots instead!)

12. Accomplishments and Lessons Learned • All goals met. Exceeded our own expectations in areas of reliability, participant involvement, and effort required to maintain • Daily Reports for file transfers might be cumbersome but works well for reducing bandwidth used and increasing average information content transferred. • Synchronized “laptop-websites” work well on UNOLS vessels and are much easier to implement that we thought before SW06.

13. SW06 Post-cruise

14. Realtime* and Post-cruise Data Samples

15. Available ExView Views

16. SHRUView Integrated Info and Widgets • Spectrograms • Audio Files (Play/Download) • Temperature Profiles • Clickable Temp TimeBar • Calendar/Time Search • Environmental Data • IMET (KNR, OCE) • Add/View Interpretations • Map Display • Ship/Glider Tracks • Mooring Locations

17. Post-cruise Interpretations

18. Other Candidate Views?

19. Steps for creating ExView views for your data products • Spend 2 hours white-boarding with us • Iterate on view layout via email and conference call on a mockup of the view design with us • We provide you with time estimate based on design complexity,new widgets required, etc. • We establish on image format, plotting and model parameters, filename, etc. conventions to be used. • You create data products (typically graphic images) and make them available on your server. • We build new view and incorporate it into ExView

20. http://sealion.whoi.edu/om-bin/ge_sw06.kml

21. Future work • Publish a paper describing role of ExView in SW06 and examine SW06 experiment in context of planned national ocean observatory needs/efforts underway. • Build viewers for interested PIs so that their data products can be integrated into ExView. • More tightly associate various ExView views (using overlays, dhtml, etc.) • Work w NSF to incorporate ExView and SWAP2 as standard on UNOLS vessels • Integrate Google Earth more fully into ExView

22. Thanks to you all. You were great to work with. • WHOI ExView Team • Jim Akens, John Kemp, Steve Lerner, Jim Lynch, Andy Maffei, Art Newhall, Cindy Sellers, Laura Stolp, Barrie Walden • COOL Lab - Scott Glenn and his whole team • Shipboard Technical Staffmembers and crew - Udel, URI, WHOI, Quest • SW06 - All participants for their patience, helpful suggestions, willingness to contribute.

23. Extra Slides

24. Building ShruView

25. What might a POMooringView Look Like?