Saving the world one application at a time: Atlas of Tuna and Billfish Catches
This blog post covers some work we have done to support the FAO Fishery and Acqualture Department, specifically the FIGIS group with information dissemination about catches of Tuna and Billfish over the last 60 years globally.
As stated on their website:
Using Geoserver, OpenLayers and Ext-JS, we built for them a simplfied viewer that allow users to access dynamically their statistics and to map them by multiple dimensions:
- by gears (one or more)
- by species (one or more)
- for a certain years’ range
- for a certain quarters’ range
- Cumulative catches across years
- Average catches across years
- Average catches across quarters
Background maps are served via GeoWebCache, nothing too sophisticated there, while the maps are generated on the fly by GeoServer connected to the FAO corporate Oracle instance via SQL Views that are performing join and aggregations on the fly between tables containing live information about catches and tables containing ancillary information like species and gear types. In addition, users can print the current map (together with the eventual result of a request for info on the map), as shown here below,
or they can request to generate an animated GIF, leveraging on the WMS Animator work (see this page for additional info) using a specific panel shown below where multiple dimensions can be again controlled:
Here below the resulting animations is shown.
Let us now summarise a few points for this project:
- background maps are served with GeoWebCache which is shared with all the others mapping applications in places withing the department
- most of the data is stored inside the corporate instance of Oracle Spatial, demonstrating perfect integration of Open Source with COTS
- extensive usage of CQL filters and SQL Parametric Views has been made to generate dynamic maps and animations