Plone as a cyanobacteria tracking site
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
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