With our most recent project we came another step closer to the realisation that government geospatial projects are moving out of the 90′s. We were asked by a client to build an online modelling tool for evaluating risk resulting from a natural hazard such as an earthquake. Understanding risk requires identifying the hazard (e.g. Tsunami) and exposure (e.g. population in a coastal city).
Data on hazards and exposure forms inputs to the risk and impact models. Such data is normally under the custodianship of national governments, with the responsibility of custodianship often distributed across departments and agencies. Bringing the data together into a single modelling tool is not just a technically challenging task but also requires cooperation and sharing of data across agencies. And anyone who’s worked in government knows this is often harder to do than solving the engineering challenges. We were very fortunate to have the involved custodians onboard with an eagerness to learn and deploy new technologies.
Back in the 90′s such hazard models would be run on a desktop with access to the data via a local disc copied from all the DVD’s posted by the data custodians using snail-mail.
This was a fine solution back in the 90′s but in the 21st century, quite frankly, it starts to look embarrassing. Our proposed solution was a distributed architecture which pulled hazard and exposure data using OGC web services and ran the model on a modelling server that could be scaled. The modelling server pushed the results of the run to another OGC compliant server. This is a simplified drawing of the architecture:

Once the model run was complete the client was notified via websockets. Here is the final application in action:
If you can’t access the video below – you may download the 16MB m4v file here or 10MB for the iphone.
Cool eh! With all these moving parts we needed to ensure that the various services were being monitored. Introducing Monit. If you haven’t heard of Monit check it out here: System Monitoring With Monit. It keeps tabs on your server daemons. If you have any questions feel free to post in the comments or get in touch via email.
… and I am in Berlin, if you are in town come say hi. 


As I said in my last post one of the topics of discussion at the melbourne’s Mapserver users group meeting was the uptake of OGC standards by the OSS community. Here’s an example of OSS taking lead in implementing upcoming open standards: the current