[Scientific] Plone as a cyanobacteria tracking site

[Xavier Heymans]

Hi,

You are referring to PrimaGIS in your email. You may be interested to  
know that there is a large GIS Plone/Zope project in Ireland:

http://www.zeapartners.org/articles/gis008

The slides attached to this article are very detailed.

Regards,
Xavier


On 04 Apr 2008, at 18:12, Moisan Yves wrote:
> Cross-posted to : NGO-plone, Scientific-Plone and Community- 
> gispython lists
>
> Hi All,
>
> A couple of years ago, I built a Plone portal that was aimed at  
> solving the communication and mapping/scientific needs of watershed  
> organizations in our part of the World : Québec.  Watershed  
> organizations here are NGO's and they are called "organisations de  
> bassin versant" (literally "watershed organizations").
>
> The project was based on a few content types I derived from  
> PrimaGIS (see products on Plone.org with category = geospatial)  
> classes and PCL/ZCO, which was the prominent (in my eyes) Zope 2  
> geospatial stack software then.  Briefly, the content types had to  
> do with Measurement stations, individual measurements and sensor  
> objects.  The site allowed people to pinpoint a map to locate a new  
> station (folderish) and the interface allowed people to create  
> individual measurements in a given station.  Measurements could be  
> plotted as time series [or almost ;-)] using matplotlib and I did a  
> bit of CSS trickery to color code measurement values (in table  
> cells) that exceeded regulatory criteria.  Measurement stations  
> could be viewed both as lists of items in a folder (attribute  
> search) or on a map (spatial search).  The last measurement value  
> would pop up as one hovered above a Station.  The site ran on Plone  
> 2.1.x and I later brought it to a 2.5 instance, but I never  
> followed up on development and the project failed due to both my  
> relative incompetence as a Zope newbie at the time and the lack of  
> buy-in from the stakeholders of the project.
>
> For two summers in a row now, Québec lakes and rivers have begun to  
> show they were sick of all the junk we put in them and as a  
> consequence we have witnessed important cyanobacteria blooming  
> episodes that usually result in people not being allowed to use the  
> lakes for recreational activities and also for domestic purposes  
> (you can't take a shower with the polluted water, etc.).  I was  
> asked if the portal I'd made earlier could be revived to serve as a  
> "knowledge base" for cyanobacteria.  At this point in time,  
> stakeholders are not well defined and user stories even less.
>
> My idea now is to use Plone as a true participatory environment.   
> I'm fed up of "web sites" presenting read-only information.  If  
> people want to know about cyanobacteria, they can go to all the  
> Wikipedias around and in my view we do not need to build yet  
> another web site on the issue.  What I envisage instead is an  
> environment where people at large could truly participate in the  
> cyanobacteria blooming monitoring effort.  I'd like to let people  
> living near lakes pinpoint a part of their lakes where  
> cyanobacteria is seen (via GeoRSS ?) and eventually have a map of  
> blooming events, that is a spatio-temporal aggregation of blooming  
> event reports.  Given that some stakeholders will likely want to  
> keep some control on the information (they won't let ordinary "non  
> expert" citizens feed data in without review, which in some  
> circumstances could make sense), how have people approached such a  
> community issue to ensure the various stakeholders don't step on  
> one another's toes and feel they all contribute to the issue ?
>
> At this stage, I'm asking for urls of sites that tackle similar  
> environmental issues that involve a large variety of stakeholders  
> from government department officials though to county/city  
> officials and citizens.  I googled "Plone cyanobacteria" but didn't  
> find much so I'm now relying on the experts/enthusiasts on the  
> above mentioned lists for pointers.  I need inspiration from what  
> others have done :-).
>
> TIA,
>
>
> Yves Moisan
>
>
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