Salmon Escapement Database System (NuSEDS)

Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, Pacific Region, Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver B.C.

Client Profile

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is responsible for policies and programs in support of Canada’s economic, ecological and scientific interests in oceans and inland waters.

The Challenge

DFO needed a flexible and extensible application that allows for capture of data about various species of fish, and which provides various types of users access in different ways (direct connection, disconnected use in the field, public Internet access). Because of the volume and variability of the data, and changing data capture and analysis needs, there are hundreds of possible combinations for data—with new variations added on a regular basis—that must be captured and made available by the application.

Solution Highlights

In under 4 months elapsed time, and less than 200 person days of effort, T4Bi delivered a very innovative application that simplifies several difficult business and technical issues. Other groups had proposed to address the same scope with effort estimates equal to 700+ person days, and with significant hardware upgrades and new software licensing requirements.

The application is currently used by different groups within the Pacific Region, by their BC Provincial counterparts, and by numerous contracted groups in the private sector. Some areas of the application will be made available to the public over the Internet at a later date.

T4Bi’s solution provides a framework for the capture and storage of almost any scientific data (biological, environmental and analytical derivations of these data). The same code operates in a stand-alone MS Access environment (to provide a disconnected mode) and as Internet application, with a central Oracle database. Workflow processes are used to synchronize data between the two modes.

Technologies Used

Currently, the standalone applications have been deployed on Windows ’95, ’98, NT and XP, using Apache Tomcat. The Internet application runs on a Windows NT server with Oracle 9iAS. The application has been tested and run under Linux environments and with various other Web servers, including JRun, WebLogic and Orion, and with all recent versions of the most popular Internet browsers.

The T4Bi solution allows the Ministry to consolidate data from different local and legacy databases into a true enterprise data resource, with common classifications and known data quality. Data loss and dissipation can be avoided, and data quality can be proactively managed. – Fisheries and Oceans Canada