Lead Investigator

Christine Borgman

Overview

The CENS Deployment Center (CENSDC) will be a multi-purpose web-tool and service to support CENS research pre-deployment planning and post-deployment knowledge transfer by using a searchable database of deployment information. The CENSDC will provide access to past, current, and future CENS deployments in a centralized web location, searchable by structured metadata such as the deployment location, technologies used, and participating students, staff, and faculty. The CENSDC will give users internal and external to CENS an overview of the wide-ranging research deployment activities. It will help to indoctrinate inexperienced individuals, streamline deployments, and increase remote staff efficiency, reducing deployment errors and facilitating knowledge transfer throughout CENS. Additionally, it will provide a cross-linkable source of contextual information for SensorBase data, important documentation for research papers.

Approach

The CENSDC will provide the following main services: the ability to create and publish a pre-deployment plan through an easy to use web interface, and the means to generate a self-contained deployment report for future use. The CENSDC planning services will help ensure better preparation and smoother deployments. The report generating system will compile deployment reports from the experiences of the deployment team, illustrating the types of problems that may arise in the field. These deployment reports will be searchable by any user who wanted to understand how a deployment ran, the context for the collection of a specific dataset, find similar deployments to one being planned in the future, etc. Through this database, CENS will be able to capture important contextual deployment information, such as which motes and sensors were used on a particular deployment, for the benefit of current and future research. The database will be an excellent training tool for students new to field research.

Systems

The CENSDC consists of a back-end SQL database that uses PHP to dynamically generate web pages. Through a system of forms, deployment information is submitted to the database. The entire site will be available publicly for searching on a number of facets, including experiment type, technology, location, people, or any multi-facet combination, allowing any interested viewer access to approved upcoming deployment plans and post-deployment reports. For a user with an account there will be some added functionalities, such as the ability to save reports of interest, and create new deployment records.

Accomplishments

The project proposal, including a rapid prototype, was presented in September, 2006.  Development began in January of 2007. Functional requirements for the system were extracted from studies of CENS scientific data practices [1-3], supplemented by discussions with CENS researchers. Those requirements were used to create plans for the database structures, web interfaces, and future functionalities of the system. We are currently in the process of working with the UCLA Academic Technology Services (ATS) group on constructing the back-end database and front-end interface modules. Other key tasks of the initial system development period include collecting deployment documentation, such as deployment task lists and equipment lists, for entry into the database, and conducting preliminary system usability tests.  We expect to have an alpha version of the system ready for initial testing by the beginning of April 2007. Upon completion of the first system iteration, we will input the collected deployment documentation (deployment task lists, equipment lists, etc) into the database. Early research relating to this project has been reported in [3-6].

Future Directions

Future work will focus on construction, testing, and implementation of the system. The initial version of the system will be tested on individual deployments at the James Reserve. Following system modifications based on the initial tests, the system will be tested more widely on a variety of deployments over the 2007 summer. A key future direction of work on the CENSDC will be to integrate the system with the CENS bibliographic database and SensorBase. The three systems together can provide a flow of research documentation from the contextual deployment information, to the data generated from those deployments, to the publications stemming from those data. As data are put into SensorBase, they can be linked to the corresponding deployment report in the CENSDC, and from the other direction, a deployment report should point to the data set generated by that deployment in SensorBase. The CENSDC will also provide researchers with the ability to document the motes or sensors they use to acquire data. The capture of this important contextual information can help researchers later as they reuse their own data, or share their data with others.

People

Faculty:

• Christine Borgman - UCLA, Information Studies

Research Staff:

• Mike Taggart - James Reserve
• Jillian Wallis – CENS, UCLA

Graduate Students:

• Matthew Mayernik - UCLA, Information Studies