|
Development of an Aquatic and Terrestrial/Riparian
Data Management System
BC Hydro
Aquatic and terrestrial/riparian ecosystem data
are essential for the environmental management of hydro facilities,
and good data management practices provide a foundation for both
long term strategic planning and short term operational decisions.
ESSA was engaged by BC Hydro to conduct a comprehensive user needs
assessment and make design recommendations for a web-based Aquatic
and Terrestrial/Riparian Data Management System. The fundamental
drivers of this project have been BC Hydro's need to:
 |
develop a mechanism to assemble available and
relevant information, ensure that it is properly archived, and
make it more widely accessible to improve the quality of operating
decisions; and |
|
develop an appropriate system for archiving and
accessing aquatic resource information collected through the
development and monitoring of Water Use Plans. |
The project team recommended that the system's
most important function should be provision of access to reports,
raw and processed data, new and historic data, and links to other
data and reports outside the system. Additionally, it was recommended
that the new system be designed to have the capacity to interface
with other databases, to easily import data from them, and to handle
data in different forms and of varying quality. These features would
enable BC Hydro to coordinate data collection and management efforts
with other agencies to minimize overlap and ensure that BC Hydro's
prototype remains compatible.
Deliverables for this first phase of the project
included:
|
a detailed inventory and assessment of end user
requirements; |
|
a proposed architecture for the system, including
major components, their functions, and the relationships between
them; |
|
an overview of existing systems and databases
with which the proposed system may interact; |
|
requirements for hardware, software and support;
and |
|
a plan for implementing the system, including
tasks, schedule and approximate costs. |
The next phase of this work, prototype system
development, is currently under way. ESSA has been engaged by BC
Hydro to specify the technical requirements for the database, identify
and evaluate the hardware and software products required, and to
build and test a web-based prototype using Microsoft's .NET framework
and an SQL Server database.
|
