The environmental sciences help us understand the dynamics of the natural resources we depend on, and which impact us in ways we often don’t realize. Accordingly, it’s important both to carry out environmental research in a well-targeted fashion and to present the results from that research in a clear, comprehensible, engaging way. Together, these enable us to make well-informed individual and public-policy decisions about the management of the environment and natural resources.
Presenting the results from environmental research effectively involves multiple challenges. Environmental datasets are large, geospatially-dependent, and multivariate, and the software tools needed to work with that data are often challenging to get working properly. Further challenges arise in the process of actually carrying out the data analysis. Finally, presenting results in an understandable and engaging way can be difficult—many tools exist to create interactive dashboards from data, but connecting them to large geospatial datasets is not always straightforward.
Tethys Platform seeks to simplify working with and presenting environmental research data. More than a dashboard builder, it integrates a variety of open source tools, with the goal of simplifying the process of working with environmental data and models to create compelling, insightful, and interactive web applications that help users understand environmental challenges. Tethys Platform uses the Django web framework as the primary tool for interface design, with multiple interop APIs and plugins (“Gizmos”) to easily integrate other tools, such as:
- GeoServer, 52 North, and PostGIS/PostgreSQL for geospatial data handling
- CesiumJS, OpenLayers, Plotly, Bokeh, and Highcharts JS for visualization
- HTCondor and Dask for distributed computing
- Internal APIs for workflow management, app layouts, quota and storage management, and more
In this Open Source Showcase event, Tethys Platform maintainers Nathan Swain and Shawn Crawley take us on a tour of the project, including its history, its current capabilities, and the vision for the future.
Nathan Swain @ GitHub: https://github.com/swainn
Shawn Crawey @ GitHub: https://github.com/shawncrawley
Tethys Platform: http://www.tethysplatform.org/
Tethys Platform docs: https://docs.tethysplatform.org/en/latest/index.html
Tethys Platform @ GitHub: https://github.com/tethysplatform
Aquaveo: https://aquaveo.com/
Lynker: https://lynker.com/
July 27, 2023
