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ARTEMeS

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ARTEMeS - a full description

Alphecca Real Time Environmental Measurement System

• Introduction


• Measurements


• Internal Database


• Project Organisation


• Interactive Displays


• Data Input


• Data Output


• Browser Requirements


• Installation scenarios


A microlight aerodrome


Agricultural Colleges


Petroleum Production Company





• See a live ARTEMeS demonstration system

Introduction

ARTEMeS is a web-enabled data acquisition and display system for measurements of environmental parameters. Designed with the twin aims of addressing the failings and limitations of other more established solutions and of providing highly interactive displays to the end user, ARTEMeS is available now and offers unprecedented versatility and ease of integration with clients' own IT systems.
This flexibility, coupled with the sound mathematical practice and rigorous data handling procedures that are inherent in the architectual design will make ARTEMeS the first choice for clients who require access to real time measurements from geological depths to the heights of space.
ARTEMeS is a data acquisition system; it provides the link between the instrumentation that measure parameters and the user who needs access to those measurements. It has been designed so that that link is as flexible as possible whilst still allowing many of the features specific to each instrument to be retained.

ARTEMeS has been designed from the outset to use the Internet as a conduit for source data to be acquired and for the dissemination of data for display or output to other systems. Data from measurement devices may be collected from anywhere in the world by ARTEMeS on a regular timed basis; devices may also send data from anywhere to ARTEMeS at random or regular intervals whenever new data is available.
ARTEMeS is not limited to the Internet, however. It will also acquire measurements from instrumentation on corporate networks using appropriately-constructed files.

Measurements

In ARTEMeS, Alphecca Systems have leveraged the power of modern Object-Oriented programming techniques to extend the concept of a "measurement" far beyond that of the traditional approach of most competitor systems.
This means that the servers at the core of ARTEMeS handle the simplest meteorological parameters, like air temperature, and much more complex parameters, such as images from space or seismograms, with equal facility. In addition, the storage method used for basic measurements ensures that any rules specific to a measurement type are imposed automatically.
ARTEMeS stores and transports measurements and metadata about the measurements together, ensuring that individual data sets cannot be taken out of context. Thus, an air temperature of, say, 26.3° Celsius at some precise location can never be mistaken for data from another location or a temperature measured in Fahrenheit.
Some other real time systems rely on appropriate annotation to be manually applied to data displays at installation, a process that is both error-prone and time consuming. With ARTEMeS this is unneccessary and such errors are impossible.
In addition to the linkage between data and metadata, ARTEMeS links related measurements into groups, again ensuring that measurements are always taken in context.

Internal Data Base

ARTEMeS uses an external relational data base management system (RDBMS) at it's heart to manage the organisation of data and hold information about the operation of the whole system. A number of suitable RDBMS programs exist having different licensing requirements. At present the ARTEMeS table structure has been ported to PointBase® and MySQL®; the ARTEMeS demonstration on this site is a fully-functional system using MySQL.
Other suitable RDBMS include SQLServer® and Oracle®, allowing ARTEMeS to use a clients' own database server if required.

PointBase® is a registered trademark of PointBase inc
MySQL® is a registered trademark of MySQL AB
SQLServer® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation
Oracle® is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation

Project Organisation

ARTEMeS supports multiple projects and multiple users, with each user having access rights to defined data sets within specific projects. Once a user has logged in to ARTEMeS he has access only to his own data; he cannot even detect the existence of any other projects. Furthermore, data are organised within projects as realms; each user is granted access to specific realms.
Each project is associated with a specific time zone so that data are always presented with the correct time, irrespective of where in the world the data is accessed from. The project time zone may be changed if required, all recorded data are then automatically presented in the new time zone.

Interactive Displays

ARTEMeS features interactive displays of data that allow the user to visualise the measured parameters with previously-unknown ease. At a minimum the simplest displays provide details of location, height and units of each parameter with a single mouse-click; more advanced displays offer rotatable, 3D views of animated current profiles or animated photograph sequences. Almost any display is possible; please contact Alphecca Systems to discuss any specific requirements.
It is possible to embed displays from an ARTEMeS server within a clients' own web pages, even when hosted on an external web server, bringing the benefits of ARTEMeS' interactive displays and robust data handling to clients with limited IT infrastructure.

Data Input

Measured data from instruments may be sent across the Internet to an ARTEMeS server anywhere in the world using an ARTEMeS Instrument Interface (AII). An AII is a special program that couples raw data from the instrument to the ARTEMeS server, and which may run on a variety of platforms from a complete desktop PC running Windows® or Linux® to a single board microcontroller.

Internet-enabled microcontroller

Windows® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds

Data Output

ARTEMeS supports the export of data in a variety of formats to external devices at regular intervals, using an ARTEMeS export engine. The export engine is a program which can run on a computer remote from the ARTEMeS server, but is completely controlled by it, having details such as export interval and task determined by the ARTEMeS database.
Exports may be configured so that they always run, or only run up to a certain interval following the trigger time.
Examples of export tasks from ARTEMeS include twice-daily e-mails or faxes containing forecasts or the previous day's measurements; an illuminated LED sign board giving the tidal height and wind at a marina; or a daily file of recorded data for use in a legacy archiving system.

ARTEMeS provides a feature called "server chaining", whereby the ARTEMeS server will convert stored data for a defined time period back to a similar form to that produced by an AII. This allows another ARTEMeS server to acquire the same data as a backup by reading it from a web server. The server chaining method used automatically infills gaps within the secondary data set caused by network inavailability or power interruption.

Browser Requirements

ARTEMeS interactive displays are designed to be viewed using web browsers such as Internet Explorer® or Netscape® that feature full Java 2® support. This support is provided by the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) Plug-in from Sun Microsystems.

Java® and the Java Coffee Cup Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
Internet Explorer® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation
Netscape® is a registered trademark of Netscape Communications Corporation

Installation scenarios

ARTEMeS offers unparalleled flexibility in it's manner of use. The examples below describe three hypothetical ARTEMeS installations and serve to demonstrate the versatility inherent in it's design.

A microlight aerodrome.

An airfield for light and microlight aircraft operates a basic weather station providing measurements of wind speed and direction, as well as atmospheric pressure for checking altimeters. They have a club members' web site hosted by an external service provider; the service allows only static web pages.
The club committee wish to provide a simple display of real-time met information from their own weather station on their web site and allow descriptions of flying conditions to be manually entered by members.
The airfield has a broadband internet connection available.

Solution
A microprocessor-based AII would be written that takes in measurements from the serial port of the weather station, and produces measurements of mean wind speed, maximum wind gust (3 seconds), vector mean of wind direction and mean atmospheric pressure.
The resulting data are sent, using the Internet, to Alphecca System's own ARTEMeS server where they are stored for real time access.
The addition of the microcontroller represents the only physical change needed during the installation.
A single page of HTML would be written providing simple graphs of the wind and pressure parameters over the previous 48 hours; the latest values of each as figures and a text-display showing the observations of flying conditions. In addition, the page would have a button to access a form to manually enter the flying conditions.
The web page would be copied onto the flying club's web server. Anyone viewing the web page would see the displays without having to log in.

Agricultural Colleges.

Several agricultural colleges in Southern England operate a disparate collection of electronic weather stations; none are connected to computers but the colleges wish to link the stations together in some form of network as part of a project to study maize crops across five counties.
Each week the colleges want an ASCII file of meteorological measurements e-mailed to the project leader.

Solution
As with the microlight aerodrome, each weather station would be equipped with its own microcontroller-based AII. In this case the weather stations are all different, but by ensuring that the measurements made at each site are similiar then each AII would be virtually identical, differing only in configuration.
Data from the colleges would be sent directly to Alphecca Systems' ARTEMeS server, with data from each location assigned to a separate realm within a single ARTEMeS project.
Authorised students using the college intranets would follow a link to the ARTEMeS server where they would log-in to access the measurements.
The ASCII file could be generated by an ARTEMeS export engine running on one of the college computers; the college would then manage the file and its e-mailing to the project leader. Alternatively, the export task could be handled by Alphecca Systems on their behalf.

Petroleum Production Company.

A major petroleum production company in the Far East operates a large number of production platforms in a shallow shelf sea. They require a large number of meteorological and oceanographic parameters to be measured at a variety of different platforms, some manned and some not. Each of the manned platforms is to have complete autonomy in the event of a network failure, and a "master system" on shore is to maintain a real-time copy of all data for dissemination across the company's global wide area network.
All platforms have access to the wide area network.

Solution
The autonomy specified in this scenario requires that each manned platform should have it's own primary ARTEMeS server with data from each instrument fed either directly to an AII running on the same computer, or via a separate computer or microcontroller. All instrumentation on unmanned platforms would be connected to the WAN using microcontroller-based AIIs, with acquisition handled by one or more nearby primary servers.
Each primary server would be configured to employ server chaining allowing another ARTEMeS server to obtain data from it as though it were another instrument.
The "master system" on shore would be another, secondary, ARTEMeS server configured with a data set that is the total of all the primary data sets.
With this particular example, the entire ARTEMeS network will in fact be handling data from just one client, so the usual project-realm organisation is inappropriate. Instead, all the data from a single platform would comprise a "project", allowing measurements in each project to be further organised into separate realms, perhaps oceanographic and meteorological, or those related to helicopter operations and production.

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