Bringing the model to the masses
An up-close look at features of the Canada1Water platform
Delivering C1W data to the public demands a user-friendly web portal that’s built for a digitally savvy audience. Derek Steinmoeller, leader of the Aquanty team spearheading that effort, offers a preview of what’s in the works.
“We want to set a new precedent for what data portals can look and feel like.”
Data presentation isn’t often the strongest part of a scientific project, usually leaving a lot of deciphering and interpretation to the user. Steinmoeller and his colleagues have a different goal in mind for C1W.
SLEEK, STREAMLINED AND USER-FRIENDLY - The C1W portal will bring the full model to life and give users easy, intuitive ways to get at the data and simulation results of greatest interest to them.
“Standard data retrieval websites are passive and limited,” says Steinmoeller. “And that’s fair, because most scientists aren’t web developers. But for Canada1Water, we want to set a new precedent for what data portals can look and feel like. Not that it’s never been tried before, but it’s extremely rare for datasets this large or for government-adjacent data.”
CLICK, ZOOM, EXPLORE
The team’s ambitions for the portal mean they need to create a visually appealing web environment with a responsive WebMaps interface and geospatial interactivity. The work they’re doing will allow users to pan or zoom to areas of interest and click on an indicator or draw an outline around a zone they want to look at. Tabbed contextual pop-up menus will offer up a choice of time period (historical, mid-century, end-of-century) and associated water metrics. Users will also be able to search locations directly by name.
“It’s not fully animated 3D, which would be too cumbersome, but it’s quasi-3D,” Steinmoeller explains. “The datasets are so big, we don’t want too many spinning beachballs.”
USER EXPERIENCE COMES FIRST
Derek Steinmoeller is a scientist and senior software developer at Aquanty. He is the co-author of Physics and Ecology in Fluids with Marek Stastna.
The size of the datasets has demanded some intensive technical problem-solving from Steinmoeller and his team. The full data is hosted at an Ontario data centre with content distribution networks (CDNs) used to store some elements locally for faster user access. The maps themselves are optimized with a mix of internally developed and off-the-shelf tools.
“Google Maps is a good analogy for the approach we’re taking,” says Steinmoeller. “We chunk things out into reasonable sizes so you’re never downloading the whole map at once. We use caching and modern tile services to dole out bits at a time, dynamically, based on what the user wants to see.”
With development now well underway, a next key step will be to mount a demo in the cloud and let select stakeholders ‘kick the tires’, offering input on the functionality provided by the portal. Web app surveys will collect qualitative feedback on the user experience: is the portal intuitive to use and does it do what users expect it to do?
Steinmoeller, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in applied mathematics with specialization in fluid dynamics, admits he never expected this is where his career path would lead him.
“I thought like most Ph.Ds. I would end up as a professor,” he reflects, “but it’s so exciting to be a piece of the Canada1Water puzzle. We’ve got such great interdisciplinary, collaborative work happening on dataset amalgamation and curation, mathematical modelling and web development — all to get Canada-wide water data out to the widest possible swath of Canadians.”