STOQS: The Spatial Temporal Oceanographic Query System

Mike McCann (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)

12:30 on Thursday 19th September (in Session 7, starting at noon, Sir Clive Granger Building: A39)

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Description: Deep exploration of campaign-oriented in-situ oceanographic measurements is made possible by open source geospatial software.
Abstract:

With increasing measurement and sampling capabilities of autonomous oceanographic platforms (e.g. Gliders, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, Wavegliders), the need to efficiently access and visualize the data they collect is growing. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has designed and built the Spatial Temporal Oceanographic Query System (STOQS) specifically to address this issue. The STOQS application consists of a Postgres/PostGIS database, Mapserver, and Python-Django running on a server and Web 2.0 technology (jQuery, OpenLayers, Twitter Bootstrap) running in a modern web browser. The web application provides faceted search capabilities allowing a user to quickly drill into the data of interest. Data selection can be constrained by spatial, temporal, and depth selections as well as by parameter value and platform name. The web application layer also provides a REST (Representational State Transfer) Application Programming Interface allowing tools such as the Matlab stoqstoolbox to retrieve data directly from the database. New capabilities provided by X3DOM are being explored for providing interactive 3D views of the data in browsers that support WebGL. STOQS is an open source software project built upon a framework of free and open source software and is available for anyone to use for making their data more accessible and usable. For more information please see: http://code.google.com/p/stoqs/