Keywords

Tethys platform, web app development, environmental, decision support, hydrologic modeling

Abstract

The interactive nature of web applications or “web apps” makes them a well-suited medium for conveying complex scientific concepts to lay audiences and creating decision support tools that harness cutting edge modeling techniques and promote the work of environmental scientists and engineers. Despite this potential, the technical expertise required to develop web apps represents a formidable barrier—even for scientists and engineers who are skilled programmers. This paper describes four hurdles that contribute to this barrier and introduces an approach to overcoming these hurdles. We present an open source implementation of this approach, a development and hosting environment for environmental web apps called Tethys Platform. Several case studies are provided that demonstrates how the approach, as implemented within Tethys Platform, successfully lowers the barrier to web app development in the environmental domain.

Original Publication Citation

Swain, N. R., S. D. Christensen, A. D. Snow, H. Dolder, G. Espinoza-Dávalos, E. Goharian, N. L. Jones, E. J. Nelson, D. P. Ames and S. J. Burian (2016). "A new open source platform for lowering the barrier for environmental web app development."Environmental Modelling & Software 85: 11-26.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2016-08-20

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/7081

Publisher

Environmental Modelling & Software

Language

English

College

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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