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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, we delivered a very innovative application
that simplifies several difficult business and technical issues.
Other groups had proposed to address the same scope for 700+ person
days, 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.
Our 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.
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| Fisheries
and Oceans Canada says... |
| “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.” |
Integrating all data and processes
provides DFO with a significant cost saving and quality improvement.
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