| Summary: | The overall objective of IWICOS is to develop a prototype marine information system that will provide a single-entry access to integrated meteorological, sea ice and oceanographic (met-ice-ocean) products in electronic form, and to demonstrate this prototype for a group of users working in fisheries, sea transport, exploitation of marine resources in Northern European waters, or whose work is related to sea ice monitoring on a scientific or pre-operational basis. A general system architecture with three main subsystems - Production, Brokering and Presentation - has been defined. Multiple producers can deliver data and information products through a common broker. Each producer can maintain separate (legacy) production systems, which can run on various computer platforms. The IWICOS metadata specification ensures that all products are described in a consistent and self-describing manner, which can be queried and processed by computer algorithms. A number of new product types have been generated for the Extended System, e.g. augmented sea ice thickness maps, multi-prognosis of numerical predictions and products based on new sensors like QuickSCAT and NOAA AMSU. The Broker lies at the core of the IWICOS system, holding the central repository of metadata for all products. It provides facilities for receiving metadata from Producer Systems, and for maintaining these metadata in a database. It also provides query facilities that enable End-User Systems to retrieve metadata for all products that satisfy given criteria. The Broker is developed using freely available software and runs on Linux OS and the service programs are written in Java. The communication is secured using SSL encrypted HTTP protocol (HTTPS). Different End-User Systems provide customised display and analysis facilities for target end-user groups, and consist of a Client and Façade subsystem. Some of these are thin clients that rely on having a server generating all data and information in a form ready for presentation. Others are thick clients, which ...
|
|---|