Oceanographic Database, managing oceanographic data with GeoServer and GeoBatch

Dear All,
in this post we‘d like to introduce some work we have done recently at GeoSolutions towards an applications that is able to ingest in real-time, manage, visualize, retrieve and chart data acquired by oceanographic and meteorological sensors (like sensors mounted onboard underwater gliders as an instance) over time. We called this application, Oceanographic Database.

The infrastructure we have put together is shown in the picture below.

Summarising, we can identify the various components and their roles as follows:

  • Data is ingested via GeoBatch in near real-time with proper prepocessing
  • GeoServer is used in conjunction with some custom REST extensions for performinng visualization, dissemination and export to Google Earth
  • A REST framework wrapping on an open source charting library is used to generate charts on the fly from the ingested data.

In the following videos we are going to describe the main functionalities of the infrastructure.

The first video below shows the basics of the front-ed as well as the following functionalities:

  • basic and advanced filtering for visualization
  • creation of charts from ingested data
  • search and download of data
  • export in Google Earth with support for temporal animation and underwater visualization

The second video below covers the extensive charting functionalities.The O&M Database is capable of plotting 2D charts  of the acquired geophysical parameters like:

  • Temporal evolutions of a certain parameter
  • Evolution of of a certain parameter over a depth range
  • Correlation of two parameters in a certain spatiotemporal range
  • Scatter diagram of a parameter with JET colormap
Going into details, the O&M Database allows users to filter data and then move onto the Diagrams Panel for selecting the parameters to plot as well as the type of diagram, Notice that charts are plotted in real time using the live data as the are stored in the sytem. This makes the tool a perfect mean to monitor the acquisition of data since very refined query can be used to plot chats of specific subsets of the data.

The third video below shows the O&M Database Data Download capability, which allows users to search for  the original data and then to download them in the original format. As an instance we can search for Glider’s data acquisitions and download them as netCDF files.

The forth video below shows the experimental Temporal Animation Capability of the O&M Database that allows users to perform simple temporal animations to visualize the temporal evolution of the acquisitions on the map.

The application is entirely built exploiting Open Source frameworks and libraries. Our intent is to make it availabe to our customers as part of our Enterprise Support Plans as Open Source under the GPL license (the proper license is still under evaluation).

Are you curious to know more about the features of the Oceanographic Database? Interested in knowing how we can help your organization reach your goal? Contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,