Portfolio & Clients

Many clients in my portfolio have been oceanographically based and require a vast array of disparate data to be aggregated, translated, and ultimately packaged in a user-friendly way. I leverage my active involvement and leadership in regional and national data management committees to find, implement, and create the best-fit solution for oceanographic data packaging. Clients have relied on me to create secure asset-monitoring applications, such as those created for Horizon Marine, Inc., a respected ocean current forecasting company, as well as to create publicly accessible portals such as NOAA's National Weather Service Marine Weather Portal.

Horizon Marine, Inc.

HMI specializes in providing oceanographic services to clients that range from large oil companies to individuals participating in yacht racing competitions.

I was contracted to create geospatial databases for their buoy and ship data since they had not fully developed a centralized data repository for ocean observations. Once this step was completed, I designed geographic information system (GIS) websites that are essential components of their day-to-day operations as well as portals for data access by their clients.

My approach to data integration and standardization has enabled HMI to share their data via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) protocols (namely Web Mapping and Web Feature Services, WMS and WFS, respectively).

As an example, much of this end-to-end work was encapsulated in iBoattrack, an HMI research and development project that creates sailboat race tracking web sites and GPS tracking devices. I was responsible for the website programming, mapping, database design and population, binary buoy data decoding, system administration of the network clusters, and fail-safe redundancy.

Horizon Marine, Inc.

iBoatTrack

Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography

Scientists and researches at WHOI have a wealth of physical and biological oceanographic data housed in a system developed as part of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (U.S. JGOFS). I was contracted to create a GIS to make this data available via a complimentary interface to its existing set of text-only web pages.

With this particular client and application, I did not have the luxury of a standard database to house the base data. Instead, I programmed my web application to interface with their developing metadata ontology database to yield an OGC-compliant front-end to their data.

One of the requirements for this WHOI application was that data be available via the new Oceans layer in Google Earth. As a result of our work to homogenize the data via my middleware and their ontology, much of their data is readily available in several OGC formats which include Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a format that Google Earth readily accepts.

Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Collection

NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS)

Many ocean observing system organizations aspire to have their data products and data management practices become part of a larger, more permanent and integrated footprint. As the primary architect and programmer, I leveraged the work I had done for small, medium, and large ocean observing groups, Caro-COOPS, SEA-COOS, and IOOS, to aggregate disparate data into the new Marine Weather Portal (MWP) for NOAA’s National Weather Service.

This interactive mapping and data website is becoming the standardized template for all coastal weather forecast offices to display marine data and marine hazards. Up until the advent of the MWP, NWS did not have a standardized template for their marine web pages.

In order to facilitate deployment and the eventual handoff of this Google Map-based suite to the NWS, the entire backend is housed within a VMWare ESXi environment. This virtualization will help maintain system scalability as the geographic footprint increases.

NOAA Development Site

Southern University Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing & Prediction Program

SURA-SCOOP was an end-to-end implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system to produce hurricane ensemble-based forecast products. One of my primary functions was to take a variety of forecast outputs and to place a common API in front of this binary gridded data in a timely fashion.

I manipulated the forecast products to avail them via Web Mapping and Web Feature Services. As a result, scientists across the southeast could see GIS visualizations of their products in real-time during and after major storm systems.

I also availed in-situ and model data via the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) thereby providing a way to easily perform model- to-in-situ and model-to-model time series comparisons.

Baruch Institute & The Advanced Solutions Group (ASG)

While working at USC, I became aware of the benefits of Open Source technology and implemented best-fit software solutions for GIS applications. An example of this was my development, coordination, implementation, and documentation of applications based on MapServer, other Open Source software packages, and ESRI desktop applications (proprietary software) for local, regional, and international GIS efforts.

I moved from a position at ASG of database design, architecture, and programming for state agency software, to a position within the Marine Science program at The Baruch Institute. I spearheaded the coordination and implementation of early efforts to produce a GIS web portal for near real time integrated coastal ocean observation data and model products. This application suite was an embodiment of my professional strengths: database design, binary data translation, data integration, and data dissemination.

I carried these approaches from a Carolinas-only regional program, the Carolinas Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction System (Caro-COOPS), to the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing System (SEA-COOS), and finally to a national project, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). Each time the geographic footprint of my project grew, so did my appreciation for product scaling and software modularity. By the time I began direct involvement with the IOOS, I had begun to leverage the OGC communication protocols to allow my applications to interface with others.