NEPTUNE Canada

NEPTUNE Canada’s Data Management and Archive System (DMAS) links our underwater infrastructure to our diverse user community on the Internet. DMAS:

• collects, indexes and archives all scientific data gathered by our network
• makes the data searchable and openly available
• allows scientists to remotely control individual instruments
• manages underwater power and network bandwidth

Additional DMAS capabilities:

• automatic surveys (e.g. periodic programmed recordings or sweeps by cameras or rotary sonars to monitor changes over time)
• event detection and reaction (e.g. automatic activation of an imaging sonar or camera to observe effects of a seismic tremor on morphology or fluid discharge)

Photo of DMAS Java developer Darryl Bidulock. Photo taken 21 October 2008. ( Click to enlarge.)

DMAS is developed in-house by three teams:

• Development Team: works from requirements to design and code DMAS
• Quality Assessment Team: runs functionality and regression tests on new code
• Systems and Operations Team: deploys approved code into production and maintains/monitors all operational systems

This organization has allowed us to adopt the agile software development approach. We normally implement, test, and deploy new features into production every other week.

DMAS is in use, not only for the NEPTUNE Canada, but also for VENUS, facilitating our goal of interoperability between these observatories and other sites for some types of data and web services.