Results of a Needs Assessment Survey of the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN)
Annie Simpson, Jim Graham, Michael Browne, Hannu Saarenmaa, Elizabeth Sellers
Abstract
The Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN) is developing a system for the exchange of invasive species information over the Internet utilizing TDWG standards. A critical step in the process of creating this system is to determine requirements of its eventual users. The system's users can be divided into four types:
1) data providers: organizations and persons that will provide data;
2) data consumers: intermediary organizations and persons that will use the system's primary data for modeling and other analyses, and then make these value-added products available back through the system;
3) stakeholders: those who support the system without necessarily providing or consuming data; and
4) end users: those who use the system’s data and/or analyses, but do not provide products back through the system.
The results of a needs assessment survey to obtain user requirements, which ran from 15 December 2006 through 15 February 2007, had both surprising and expected elements.
With 137 respondents from 41 countries, 80% identify themselves as providers and consumers of invasive species data. As expected, most (77%) offer invasive species spatial/temporal information, profiles/species pages (65%), and checklist information (59%). Although most are data providers, their technical knowledge is surprisingly low: 80% said they do not know what existing protocols are appropriate for invasive species information management; 45% do not know the level of web services their organization provides and/or uses; 75% did not know what schemas/grammars would be acceptable to copy or extend for the GISIN data exchange system. A complete report of survey results is available at http://www.gisinetwork.org/Survey/SurveyResultsFinal.htm.
From the results of this survey, it was determined that standards for the GISIN system will need to be both simple to implement and easy to understand, if the system is to be a success. Because only 23% of respondents said Python is an acceptable programming language for a toolkit, a Py-wrapper application is not being considered at this time. Likewise, SOAP (Service Oriented Architecture Protocol) is not being considered, because it is more complex than is needed and would significantly slow data exchange within the system.
Because the results of the needs assessment survey indicated that a complex solution would not be met with wide acceptance and would be too expensive for current funding levels, the GISIN system operates as a simple HTTP Request/Response protocol. This method is used to serve web pages on the Internet and ensures the best access through firewalls without security problems. This approach also provides the required flexibility with high performance.
The GISIN protocol is a subset of the functionality defined by TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval).Only simple Key-Value Pair (KVP) requests are supported because complex filters encoded as XML (Extensible Markup Language) were not required.
Respondents to the needs assessment survey listed ASP, JSP, and PHP (in that order) as acceptable internet frameworks for a toolkit. Therefore a GISIN data providers’ workshop is being planned for 13-16 November with programmers of these three frameworks as instructors. Although 80% of the respondents preferred receiving a software toolkit to install and configure on their server to become a GISIN data provider, at the November meeting programmers and database managers will create their own code to map each of their unique database systems to the GISIN protocol.
Special thanks to Jeremy Kranowitz, who donated his time to configuring, running, and analyzing the survey, and to his organization, The Keystone Center.
1) data providers: organizations and persons that will provide data;
2) data consumers: intermediary organizations and persons that will use the system's primary data for modeling and other analyses, and then make these value-added products available back through the system;
3) stakeholders: those who support the system without necessarily providing or consuming data; and
4) end users: those who use the system’s data and/or analyses, but do not provide products back through the system.
The results of a needs assessment survey to obtain user requirements, which ran from 15 December 2006 through 15 February 2007, had both surprising and expected elements.
With 137 respondents from 41 countries, 80% identify themselves as providers and consumers of invasive species data. As expected, most (77%) offer invasive species spatial/temporal information, profiles/species pages (65%), and checklist information (59%). Although most are data providers, their technical knowledge is surprisingly low: 80% said they do not know what existing protocols are appropriate for invasive species information management; 45% do not know the level of web services their organization provides and/or uses; 75% did not know what schemas/grammars would be acceptable to copy or extend for the GISIN data exchange system. A complete report of survey results is available at http://www.gisinetwork.org/Survey/SurveyResultsFinal.htm.
From the results of this survey, it was determined that standards for the GISIN system will need to be both simple to implement and easy to understand, if the system is to be a success. Because only 23% of respondents said Python is an acceptable programming language for a toolkit, a Py-wrapper application is not being considered at this time. Likewise, SOAP (Service Oriented Architecture Protocol) is not being considered, because it is more complex than is needed and would significantly slow data exchange within the system.
Because the results of the needs assessment survey indicated that a complex solution would not be met with wide acceptance and would be too expensive for current funding levels, the GISIN system operates as a simple HTTP Request/Response protocol. This method is used to serve web pages on the Internet and ensures the best access through firewalls without security problems. This approach also provides the required flexibility with high performance.
The GISIN protocol is a subset of the functionality defined by TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval).Only simple Key-Value Pair (KVP) requests are supported because complex filters encoded as XML (Extensible Markup Language) were not required.
Respondents to the needs assessment survey listed ASP, JSP, and PHP (in that order) as acceptable internet frameworks for a toolkit. Therefore a GISIN data providers’ workshop is being planned for 13-16 November with programmers of these three frameworks as instructors. Although 80% of the respondents preferred receiving a software toolkit to install and configure on their server to become a GISIN data provider, at the November meeting programmers and database managers will create their own code to map each of their unique database systems to the GISIN protocol.
Special thanks to Jeremy Kranowitz, who donated his time to configuring, running, and analyzing the survey, and to his organization, The Keystone Center.