On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Sarah Agarwal wrote:

> The Environment Agency produces a lot of data and the producers of
> this data are requesting that it's uploaded onto web pages. My
> feeling is that pages of numbers are not usable and that the data
> should be held in a database and pulled out when the database is
> queried. Does anyone have any advice, opinions, experience, etc,
> that could help me get my head around this particular issue?

Hi Sarah,

One of the projects we run from the ILRT has some things that you may be
interested in to help with ideas/answers to your query.

The service in question is Biz/ed <http://www.bized.ac.uk/>. The part in
particular is the data section:

http://www.bized.ac.uk/dataserv/datahome.htm

This basically allows our users to access a wide range of data sets that
we provide (sounds a bit like your user requirements). If you look at
one of the sections then you should get a feel for how it all works:

ONS Data - Balance of Payments
http://www.bized.ac.uk/dataserv/ons/dataset/ons-bopm.htm

This is the user view onto the data - they complete the simple data
request form (e.g. check some boxes, select some years and choose the
data format/type that they want to access the data in). They then submit
this and they get back a page dynamically generated with the data they
requested in the format they require.

The data is stored in a range of formats; either database applications
(in this case all under Unix but that isn't a requirement - although
some would argue that it is ;) or simple files, it really depends on
the nature of the data and your technical setup.

The benefits of doing things like this are:

1. It helps the user focus on the data that they want
2. Users only get the data that they are interested in
3. No data pages to maintain (just databases/tables)
4. Very useful service for the end users - especially the CSV download
facility so that users can then really get into the data with their own
queries and software.

Another key strength with this particular site is that it is surrounded
by lots of supporting information to help users understand the data e.g.

http://www.bized.ac.uk/dataserv/ons/onshome.htm

By holding data like this in databases it means that you can easily
provide devolved data maintenance to the data providers, with changes to
data being immediately available on the Web. That way there is no bottle
neck with markup or Web skills availability. You could do this via a
range of database applications (most likely MS Access via ODBC to the
dB on the Unix system) or data admin Web forms. The choice is endless.

Cheers,

Martin.

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Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol
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