This is the continuation of the previous article. For better understanding it is recommended to look through the earlier blog posts.
The comparative analysis of different GIS is an essential part of defining proper functional parameters and requirements needed for creating a renewable energy monitoring system. A brief overview of existing GIS and their comparative analysis allow determining the following requirements list:
Data gathering
As it has been mentioned above the NASA SSE datasets prove to be sufficiently accurate and satisfy all the requirements. But still, all the GIS have their own weather stations (or at least data of field actinometrical measurements) to verify the NASA data. Thus, it is strongly recommended to obtain local weather data along with using open source information.
Data visualization and shape files
It has been mentioned that certain GIS provide their own shape files to be later used in other visualization platforms. In this case the data on local renewable energy sources is an independent platform and allows the information to be later used for further researches. As the renewable energy monitoring system is used both for public and professional usage it is necessary to provide raster data for public (for easier access) and vector data for developers and researchers (for more accurate calculations).
Maps
The problem of inexplicit map categorization has been revealed as it is quite possible for user to be confused. Consequently, the maps are to be explicitly divided by quality and by energy types (as on the NREL website).
It is also possible to claim that for regions with high renewable energy potential the problem of energy monitoring is considered as an essential part of further development. In case of lack of field measurements the idea of using open source along with field actinometrical measurements on the certain (or existing) sites seems to be efficient from the point of view of accuracy and costs. In this case, the renewable energy monitoring systems may be considered as the strong foundation for alter development of alternative energy in the regions with high potential and high energy demands.
The problems of geographical data visualization and data distribution have been reviewed earlier in the previous posts.
Data visualization may be carried out by means of multifunctional GIS that have been analysed and partially described in the chapter. Moreover there are a certain number of powerful libraries some of which are open source and which makes GIS development much more efficient and easy. Ready tools are commonly provided as web applications using sever part as for data storage and processing, which are used to visualize data in different forms with the help of Javascript libraries. At present there is no commonly accepted classification of geographically distributed data. It is yet possible to distinguish the most typical classes concerning the task and problems solved by visualization as classification, clusterization and heat maps. The classes mentioned above may be considered as complete categories with a certain definition. In practice, the most adequate and useful tools and methods are chosen.
Today we can notice a great deal of program libraries that may be usd to create own visualization tools. In most of the cases these are client libraries written on Javascript. As this is a widely spread programming language that supports a large number of well documented and popular libraries and is, in turn, supported but a great deal of software companies and programming community Javascript remains one of the most popular solutions. Modern Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) realization allows creating flexible tools of different type visualization. All the mentioned approaches are partially presented on the existing GIS portals whose description and brief analysis are provided above. The given overview gives a general understanding of their main functional features and allows making own conclusions on data gathering and representation applied in these portals. It has also been mentioned that there are several scientific schools that conduct researches on renewable energy sources monitoring systems application. The largest ones are situated in USA, Europe, particularly in Denmark. Several schools are presented in Russia. Certain researches and applied investigations have been conducted in Kazakhstan.
The main objective of the work is to create a prototype of system that allows choosing the renewable energy site, its platform and economic potential; evaluating risks; evaluating ecological impact caused by transition to the chosen source; evaluating a possibility of transition to the intellectual storing, consumption and distribution system. The mian layers of the system are Geoinformational; Energy sources; Energy Consumers; Resources; Energy producing technology; Energy storing technology; Ecological state and risks, harm; Economic potential; Juridical estimation, Data protection.
The implementation is composed of two parts - software and hardware.
The software part is composed of data gathering, storing and processing tools (the data is collected form heterogeneous sources including information obtained from mobile station based Arduino microcontroller). The application is a typical MVC (model-view-controller) GIS functionality of which is provided by existing maps.
The data from the existing sources is to be verified by the the dataset obtained from the local mobile weather station.
To be continued.