Getting HydroServer, Presentations and Publications, Training Materials

Project Summary

HydroServer is a set of software applications for publishing hydrologic datasets on the Internet. HydroServer leverages commercial software such as Microsoft SQL Server and ESRI's ArcGIS Server for publishing hydrologic data services for an exerimental watershed or site.

Building the HydroServer Team

This is an open project that is actively seeking partners to help with coding and testing. If you are interested in working with us on the project, please introduce yourself using the Discussions page. Also, you may want to take a quick look at the Presentations and Publications that introduce and describe the project. We look forward to meeting you and working with you on this project!

Go to the Discussions Page to introduce yourself
Look at the Documentation for HydroServer users and developers

CUAHSI HIS Project Overview

The U.S. National Science Foundation supported Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences (CUAHSI - http://www.cuahsi.org) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) is comprised of databases and servers, connected through web services, to client applications, allowing for for the publication, discovery and access of data. The CUASHI HIS tools have been under development and deployment for several years and together present a relatively complete software “stack” that supports the consistent storage and publication of hydrologic and other environmental observation data.

HydroServers are one of the 3 main types of computers that are part of the HIS system. They are used by the system to store and serve hydrologic data to other computers. There are numerous ways to set-up servers that meet some or all of the requirements necessary to function as a HydroServer, but the HIS project has identified a standard configuration using a combination of readily availabe off-the-shelf software and a set of tools that have been developed by the HIS team and are available on this site.

These commercial products are leveraged as part of HydroServer and must be installed first:

Microsoft Windows 2008 Server
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)
Microsoft .Net Framework Version 3.5
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
ESRI ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 for .Net, Enterprise Advanced

Then these CUAHSI HIS developed components can be installed:

Observations Data Model (ODM)
ODM Tools
ODM Data Loader
ODM Web Data Loader
ODM Streaming Data Loader
WaterML Web Services
Capabilities Database, Capabilities Database Configuration Tool, and Capabilities Web Services
HydroServer Web Site
HydroServer Time Series Anlayst
HydroServer Map Web Application

Development Approach

This community portal has been set up to host the source code for all of the HydroServer components and to facilitate community participation in the development, testing and deployment of the project. Indeed, recognizing the value of community based code development as a means of ensuring end-user adoption, this project has adopted an “iterative” or “spiral” software development approach where 1) the general project requirements and hard boundary conditions are specified at the outset; 2) an initial brief functionality requirements list is developed; 3) the initial limited system is produced primarily by the core funded developer team, but with voluntary external programmer support as it becomes available; 4) testing and bug fixes by the developer team; 5) deployment of an installation package for end-users; 6) collection of bug notices and feature requests from end-users; 7) identification of specific bugs and features to be addressed in a new release; 8) addition of these features by the developer team, etc.

This development approach is a common approach used by open source projects because of its flexible and dynamic nature. This model is well suited to a community project where it is difficult (and often not useful) to fully-specify the functionality set required for a software release (i.e. as in the “waterfall” development approach), but rather it is desirable to maintain an open structure that can easily be extended through the development of third party plug-ins to support as-yet unknown functions and capabilities, as well as a clear policy on how code is moved into the core system, and how external developers are included in the developer team.