VME-DB

The VME consists of several components, two of which are of relevance to EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. validation; the Reports Storage Gateway (RSG) and the Reports Manager(RM). Other components, such as the FAO based website are not directly under iMarine management, but rather are made fully interoperable.

Since the RSG and RM are perceived as one by the validators, only one report is generated. The validation was performed mainly by the 2 VME-DB managers. The process here closely followed the development process, as the entire development process was more Agile in it’s approach. This approach was more appropriate in this context because the starting point was a much more stable and developed set of components (i.e. developed in the context of FCPPS), and the integration with the FAO infrastructure necessitated weekly meetings. The requirements set subjected to validation was and will remain the remit of FAO, and were not fully incorporated on the iMarine wiki for costs and efficiency reasons. VME-DB is part of a larger FAO initiative, and scoping out the validation requirements would be a unnecessary and costly duplication of effort.

Functionality

The Feature set specified by the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. in several VME-DB workshops was fully implemented; VME’s can be described and maintained by users, with a VME-DB manager fully in charge of users and content management. The capabilities were further enriched with mapping and historic support features, even beyond the initial requirements. The VME-DB team saw Generality in the approach and delivered solutions, and immediately recognized how and where VME-DB features could be re-utilized. No Security related issues were reported.

Usability

Some issues remain open on Human factors; the design and Aesthetics of iMarine solutions often do not match with existing or expected solutions. Especially the complexity of UI design could be reduced for end-users, who although appreciating the rich options, would sometimes prefer more productivity oriented screens and work-flows. This is considered a design issue that often occurs with new software release. The Consistency in design and work-flow of all iMarine components was appreciated. However, being newly released, the Documentation and training materials were deemed incomplete.

Reliability

No issues related to failures, recoverability, predictability, or accuracy that are not related to ‘poor’ data remain open as of July 2014.

Performance

No issues related to speed, efficiency, throughput, and response time remain open. There are still comments with the pre-views of the VREVirtual Research Environment.’s, but this is not solvable, as new fact-sheets have to be generate on the fly from a complex set of information.

Supportability

The EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. at large does not validate supportability. It considers the presented solution well designed, even with their focus on usability. They missed the localizability to support their local languages and metrics. Translation facilities were not expected or needed.