Case study: Alfred Wegener Institute

The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research carries out research in the Arctic and Antarctic as well as in the high and mid latitude oceans. The institute coordinates German polar research and makes available to national and international science important infrastructure, e.g. the research ice breaker "Polarstern" and research stations in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Here, in the compute center of Alfred Wegener Institut we develop a software system called "Simulation System" or short SIM. Our project is part of GITEWS, the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (www.gitews.org).

In the tsunami warning system the responsibility if the SIM is, to match pre-calculated tsunami scenarios (tsunamis that could have happened) to real incoming sensor data (measurement that does happen) and provide a list of best fitting scenarios to the system. In doing so the SIM provides an extrapolation from point wise measurement to a spatial situation overview of the ocean. An other functionality of the SIM is to provide access to the data of the pre-calculated tsunami scenarios and do an abstraction from the actual data representation.

To do this the SIM offers its interfaces via web services, namely the Web Processing Service WPS and the Web Notification Service WNS (both specified by the OGC), which are heavily based on XML.

So I use oXygen as a plug-in to Eclipse, my main development environment, for editing and creation of XML files for those services. These files describe the service or the process offered by the service. I also often create XML files that act as test requests sent to the service.

Then our system comes with its own XML formats, so I also use oXygen for creating the XML Schemas for our system. And finally I very often use oXygen for browsing the 3rdparty XML Schemas used for the Project, like the OGC Schemas or GML.

I want to say, that i like oXygen very much and that it makes my live as a developer much easier. Especially the integration with eclipse and the "easy-to-useness" of oXygen are very beneficial for my productivity.

I would like to thank you for this great software and I am very happy that you allow me to use it free of charge in your support life program.