AWDIP Testing
The objective of the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project (AWDIP) is to facilitate Australia-wide assessments of water resources through ongoing development of a comprehensive and accessible water information framework. The AWDIP was established under the national component of the Natural Heritage Trust.
The AWDIP is a framework for a network of distributed hydrological databases. The framework enables on-line access to State and Territory agency hydrographic data sets representing Australia’s first distributed database of national natural resource management data.
The infrastructure is designed to be interoperable, capable of exchanging data via a common set of business procedures, using standard file formats and protocols. Implementation of the Australian Water Data Infrastructure does not require specific operating systems nor applications, instead relying on Open Standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C – Geographic Markup Language (GML)), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC – Observations and Measurements) Web Feature Services (WFS)) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO – Geographic Metadata (ISO19115)).
The use of these Open Standards permits well understood and unambiguous communication between the components of the infrastructure. In this way the different parts of the system communicate in a pre-defined way, enabling on-the-fly querying of the databases, and delivery of responses that are consistent and readily interpreted. The use of the standards also allows the AWDIP to take advantage of developments in similar implementations in other disciplines.
LISAsoft has developed a test suite that was used to test the performance, robustness and conformance of WFS implementations to determine their acceptability for use in the AWDIP. The findings were compiled and reported back to the AWDIP, along with recommendations on improvements based on the test results.
Community Schemas allow a more richly defined set of semantics than is available in GML. This allows communities, such as the hydrology community, to define schemas appropriate for their data. These schemas can then be referenced to ensure a consistent structure and taxonomy between related datasets, improving the communities’ ability to share data. For example, a hydrology schema may define a class called Water Use with acceptable terms defined as irrigation, domestic, and industrial. If a dataset is published against this schema with a Water Use value of farming, the data will not validate and the user will know to correct the mistake.
More information on Community Schemas is available here.
The testing framework was built upon a prior project that was done to compare the performance characteristics of GeoServer and UMN MapServer. This project was done by The Open Planning Project (TOPP) and Refractions Research, with the results presented at the Free and Open Source Software conference in 2007. Andrea Aime from TOPP was contracted to help with the design and development of the test framework.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), led by Rob Atkinson, developed the Community Schema support for GeoServer, and have been involved in the deployment of AWDIP WFS nodes that will be tested during this project.
DuckHawk is an open source project, hosted here. Interested parties are invited to join the mailing list and participate in the project.
The AWDIP is a framework for a network of distributed hydrological databases. The framework enables on-line access to State and Territory agency hydrographic data sets representing Australia’s first distributed database of national natural resource management data.
The infrastructure is designed to be interoperable, capable of exchanging data via a common set of business procedures, using standard file formats and protocols. Implementation of the Australian Water Data Infrastructure does not require specific operating systems nor applications, instead relying on Open Standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C – Geographic Markup Language (GML)), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC – Observations and Measurements) Web Feature Services (WFS)) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO – Geographic Metadata (ISO19115)).
The use of these Open Standards permits well understood and unambiguous communication between the components of the infrastructure. In this way the different parts of the system communicate in a pre-defined way, enabling on-the-fly querying of the databases, and delivery of responses that are consistent and readily interpreted. The use of the standards also allows the AWDIP to take advantage of developments in similar implementations in other disciplines.
LISAsoft has developed a test suite that was used to test the performance, robustness and conformance of WFS implementations to determine their acceptability for use in the AWDIP. The findings were compiled and reported back to the AWDIP, along with recommendations on improvements based on the test results.
Community Schemas
GeoServer has been identified as the best candidate WFS for use in the AWDIP. With the recent addition of Community Schema support, added in release 2.6, GeoServer is able to fully represent the complex feature types required by the AWDIP.Community Schemas allow a more richly defined set of semantics than is available in GML. This allows communities, such as the hydrology community, to define schemas appropriate for their data. These schemas can then be referenced to ensure a consistent structure and taxonomy between related datasets, improving the communities’ ability to share data. For example, a hydrology schema may define a class called Water Use with acceptable terms defined as irrigation, domestic, and industrial. If a dataset is published against this schema with a Water Use value of farming, the data will not validate and the user will know to correct the mistake.
More information on Community Schemas is available here.
DuckHawk
In order to produce the test suite required, an open source testing framework called DuckHawk was developed. This suite supports the development of reliability, load, performance, stress, error handling and conformance tests within a continuous build environment. The framework can be configured using JUnit to allow the implementation of continuous testing, but can be extended to work in any number of continuous test systems. After the framework was put in place, the project specific tests were developed as pluggable modules. DuckHawk will live on, after completion of the AWDIP Testing project, as an open source project that system integrators and developers can use to include performance testing in their automated build systems.Who's Involved?
The Australian Bureau of Rural Sciences is responsible for the AWDIP.The testing framework was built upon a prior project that was done to compare the performance characteristics of GeoServer and UMN MapServer. This project was done by The Open Planning Project (TOPP) and Refractions Research, with the results presented at the Free and Open Source Software conference in 2007. Andrea Aime from TOPP was contracted to help with the design and development of the test framework.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), led by Rob Atkinson, developed the Community Schema support for GeoServer, and have been involved in the deployment of AWDIP WFS nodes that will be tested during this project.
DuckHawk is an open source project, hosted here. Interested parties are invited to join the mailing list and participate in the project.