Build a realtime campaign support app/webpage

[jinbow]

This topic came up a lot to me. Oceanography field campaigns often need several key remote sensing products such as ocean currents, high-res SST to support the planning and real-time coordination. It is doable manually. The normal workflow is 1. Download data from data source (DAACs e.g.), 2. Subset to the small region of interest 3. Find good images, 4. Plot them all side by side 5. Put them in a PowerPoint 6. Email to colleagues who need them. An additional step may involve overlay the locations of their own assets.

The work is tedious, slow and labor-intensive. What is the easiest way to build a quick website to integrate the whole workflow, so the whole team can be synchronized? Nothing fancy, but just provide an interface that I can select what to see from a list. Something like Google Earth, but light-weight to run quickly on a phone, which is needed for field works (hard to pull a laptop on a wet deck). I know there are many options, but what is the technically easiest for non-expert?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[ranchodeluxe]

Very interesting question @jinbow. Not sure I can provide any true "answers".

I'm mostly interested how 5. Put them in a PowerPoint came to be part of the solution? For example why not tar/zip the images and send that way?

Most of these steps strike me (naively of course) as a headless job queue, not really a website. Though a website could front the job queue with some type of form to list data sources, submit jobs. Though I imagine steps 2 and 3 would be hard to be headless, meaning you'd probably want some type of head-up human guided feedback to make those decisions. For example, steps 2 and 3 would need something like a slippy map tool that allows you draw polygon bbox(es) and then pick which images you want to continue the processing with.

Wondering if you've found any examples of existing websites or flows that inspire you since you've asked this question?

[dfelikson]

@ranchodeluxe, I'm just guessing here and @jinbow can correct me but computer resources and internet connections can be quite limited in the field. Sending tar/zip, for example, might require sending large files and, possibly more importantly, would require the person in the field to have access to GIS software that can render the imagery on a map. Alternatively, multiple maps can be created and converted to images that can be put into a slide deck, allowing the person in the field to quickly go through the slides.