Questions about site/lease areas.

[Marcus Hill]

Hey Matt,

I've got a few questions about defining site/lease areas in the database. I've bolded the most important ones, if you don't have time to answer them all:

1. Do the lease area, cable corridor and cable landing point have to be contained entirely within a site area? Or can the Site area share points/boundaries with a lease area or a cable corridor?
2. Can a cable landing point be anywhere within the cable corridor, or must it be close to/on a boundary?
3. In the beta.bathymetry table, are we defining the points for the lease area, or the site area? If for the site area, does this table contain points that are inside the cable corridor, or not?
4. Do bathymetry points have be within the boundary, or can they be on the boundary line? Or can we define bathymetry points outside of the boundary without issues?
5. Does the resolution for the bathymetry data points matter (ie 12m vs 100m)? Does the resolution have to be constant (ie a point every 12m)? Do the points have to be in a Grid pattern?
   
6. In the example database, some geometry data has been inserted as latitude/longitudes (such as site_boundary in beta.site), and other geometry data has been inserted as UTM (such as lease_boundary in beta.site). Is there a reason for this? Should I transform my data to the appropriate coordinate type to match the example database?

I've attached an example site that I'm attempting to get working in DTOcean, to give my questions a little context. I've also highlighted shared points between site, lease and cable corridor.

I'm asking these questions because i'm having some trouble working thorough this issue https://github.com/DTOcean/dtocean-issues/issues/2, and i'm trying to remove the possibility that it's the data itself or its formatting that is causing the issue.

Thanks in advance for any help you provide.

[Mathew Topper]

Hi Marcus, I'm sorry for the delay in replying to your issue. We're just starting again with DTOcean and I am trying to get organised for development out in public. Our primary concern was to make sure people could install it as we have seen a few issues (speaking of which, did you managed to use the installer in the end?).

The structure of the database is quite complex, particularly around the project (the name we give to site and device data) which is filtered on the server side. There are a lot of foreign key dependencies which are not properly implemented in the DB which will give "non-obvious" errors in the main application.

I'm a little bit blocked in giving you an appropriate answer. There is a short answer which will solve your immediate problem and then lead to more and there is an answer that will take way to long to write up right now. I'm hoping to give you something in between.

The reality is that we never acquired appropriate tools to work with the database structure we have and its something we will probably be looking to develop ourselves over the next period as we work through some more scenarios ourselves. I'm afraid that doesn't help you now, buts its something that was not completed properly when we finished the project.

We are trying to re-appropriate the dtocean.eu website. Once we have control of it again my plan is to reply to your questions in an AAQs (Any Asked Questions) section so that we can disseminate it as widely as possible.

In the mean time, I would ask you for your patience while we get ourselves organised for this new phase of development.

Best wishes,

Mat

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[Marcus Hill]

No worries. Great to hear that development will be starting up again, do you have a rough timeline yet?

Yes, I did get the installer working. Had a few issues which I worked through by uninstalling all previous versions of python on my machine (at least, i think that's what fixed it...). Much easier than installing using the individual .zip folders!

Like you say, I am finding the database a bit tricky to work with. I've made a (very) rudimentary script that helps with inserting/deleting data in the database using csv files, but I still haven't managed to get DTOcean working with my own set of data. I'll put any progress into the issue on Github.

Creating the AAQ sounds like a good idea, and happy to wait until then. 

thanks,
Marcus

[Mathew Topper]

Hi Marcus,

I've updated the AAQ page with your questions. The current link is:

https://dtocean.github.io/#aqa

You asked about a timeline and we are running DTOcean for another six months so that we can test some scenarios and establish if DTOcean can viably generate any revenue for its continued development. The plan is to update the tool and any supplementary outcomes as we progress with the scenarios and we will respond to and include user feedback along the way.

I am planning to generate a minor release at the end of this month which will fix the installer issues and other obvious bugs, but probably won't improve much on usability and outcomes. The expectation is that as we work through more scenarios we can improve the workflows and results which will then be shared with the wider community. We want to have the chance to continue with DTOcean beyond the six months and the trick to this is showing that the tool can produce useful results for real scenarios, so this is our primary goal.

If you are interested in sharing development of any of your scripts then do let me know. I think anything that can make working with the database a little easier will be really valuable to the community.

Best wishes,

Mat