Summary of Working Paper No. 4-1994

I.3.1 & II.3.1: Design and Development of Information System.

By Stig Magnar Løvås, SINTEF NHL, Christopher Smith, GRID Arendal and Kjell Are Moe, Det Norske Veritas

The purpose of the GIS design and development projects within INSROP Sub-programmes I (Natural Conditions and Ice Navigation) and Sub-programme II (Environmental Factors) is to develop an information system to serve as a tool to store, retrieve, integrate and analyze information produced from projects within INSROP Sub-programmes I and II. The Overall System Specification (OSS) describes the foreseen requirements to the system and the input data, the functional structure and an overall technical description, the structure and contents of the database (core data and metadata) and the analysis modules, and the user/system interface.

Based on the foreseen system requirements and the hardware and software resources within the institutions in the project group, the computer hardware, software, communications/network environment recommended for system development is a SUN Workstation with SunOS (UNIX) operating system software, OPENLOOK X-Window Manager software, ARC/INFO and ArcView GIS software and NFS and TCP/IP software for network communication via an Ethernet backbone. An alternative to the workstation computer is the personal computer (PC). This solution offers a low cost alternative to the workstation and is expected to provide most of the information system capabilities (i.e., display, query, and presentation components) planned for the workstation computing platform.

The information system will have 3 main modules: a database module, a query and analysis module and a reporting, presentation and user/system interface module. The query and display module of the INSROP information system will be based on ArcView. This software is a professional, commercial product designed by Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., the makers of ARC/INFO GIS software. It is a very powerful system and provides a variety of utilities to display, identify, query and print ARC/INFO coverages. The product is a critical component of the INSROP information system, since it will provide the initial view into the core database. The analysis module of the INSROP information system will be an analytical version of the query and display module with emphasis on modelling, topological overlays, and other spatial analyses. The interface to the analysis module will be designed with a task oriented approach, that is, menu options will perform a specific task.