Who Uses Dendra?
Dendra is a cloud-based, multi-organizational system, designed to support massive permanent monitoring efforts.
It is not intended for individual researchers or for short term ( < 1 year ) campaigns.
Members and Users
Section titled “Members and Users”Dendra serves two user bases: members and outside users.
Members are part of an organization that uses Dendra to operate their sensor observatory.
Users have no affiliation to an organization. They may or may not have a Dendra login.
Much of the functionality discussed in Core Concepts is aimed at the members and curators (data managers) from an organization. As a real-time system, Dendra provides a status page for an organization’s stations and sends notifications (email, slack, or text) when a station goes downm (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Sparc-lines of logger voltage are displayed as a diagnostic of station health.
User Experience
Section titled “User Experience”Both members and outside users have the same need to explore the data, dig into metadata, and download. Searching and retrieving data can be done through a modern single-page web application and through the API. The web app uses faceted search to allow data exploration for a user with live graphing of data prior to downloading (Figures 2 and 3). Modelers and Jupyter Notebook users can access data via the API, performing analyses without ever having to download data locally.
Figure 2: Dendra Search Interface
Figure 3: Dendra Graphing Interface
The user experience evolved through many iterations with the members of the ERCZO and later UCNRS & CHI-FW projects. The first versions of the search interface made little sense to the scientists. After changing controlled vocabulary to better match common usage and adding in faceted search to make discovery and plotting of measurements across dataloggers, Dendra’s UX has evolved into a tool that emphasizes getting the user to a measurement they care about at a time and place.
At the same time, the management aspect of Dendra captures and has available all the details regarding that measurement that will be important for the analysis and troubleshooting of the data. This can include
- The make and model of the sensor
- If it changed models
- If fieldnames changed in the logger
- When the last calibration was performed
And more.
See How to Explore Data to learn more.