Remote Modelling and Knowledge Dissemination Across Internet

Ms. Abrahet Mohammed Omer

Abstract

At this era planning, designing, developing and managing water resource systems certainly involve system simulation and impact prediction. This is because the tasks of planning, designing and

managing of water resource can conveniently be done using hydroinformatics modeling and simulation tools. Nonetheless, these tools are not equally available for everybody. Especially, there is a serious lack of these tools in developing countries. The shortage is mainly driven by two conditions. The first is lack of financial resources for the purchase of these tools, which usually are expensive.

The second is lack of knowledge and awareness about the capabilities of modeling tools. Practitioners and educators in developing countries either do not know the existence of the state of the art tools or they lack the skills to use them.

One way to solve these problems is to avail the modeling tool services over the Internet. This will undoubtedly cut the costs when compared to buying the HI tool package. It is apparent that introducing and establishing a facility for remote modeling and knowledge distribution over the Internet will undoubtedly benefit portions of the world with lack of knowledge, skill, modeling systems and other resources. This is directly related to MDG 8 target 18 i.e. “In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications“. In this case the research focuses on the use the benefits web technologies and Internet to avail modeling tools and other knowledge resources which will have number of indirect contributions to other goals and targets. However, establishing such a facility requires a shift from the well established practice of delivering modeling software as a package to a new more convenient way of delivering modeling softwares and packages as a service online using the advances in ICT.

Here there are several questions one can raise, like how to make it possible to use a remotely located modeling tool over the Internet and permit remote modeling and knowledge dissemination practice?

Are there sufficient technologies to support this? Are the existing HI tools suitable for web based application?

In spite of all foreseen advantages of implementing remote modeling and knowledge distribution systems their wide implementation and adaptation is hampered because of several knowledge gaps

and technical problems. This research is carried out with the objectives of identifying problems in adapting of existing modeling systems for distributed use over Internet, identifying availability and

limitations of technologies and suggesting solution to the identified problems. Moreover, the study also intends to implement prototypes to prove that the suggested solutions are practical.

In this research available Web technologies with the potential for development of remote modeling facilities were explored and compared. It is shown that there are many web technologies available for development of remote modeling facilities, even though, their performance greatly varies. From the different available technologies Delphi WebBroker and Ajax were selected for further studies and to test their applicability for the implementation of the selected prototypes. In the research two prototypes are implemented one to test the requirements and adaptability of existing HI tools for

distributed and remote modeling use and another one to see the applicability of remote knowledge dissemination. The advantages and disadvantages of Delphi WebBroker and Ajax technologies are

shown based on the performance of the two prototypes. The prototypes performance is compared based on functional and non functional requirements. Ajax seems to reduce response time since it has minimum page reloading. WebBroker has a better security and stability than Ajax.

Through this research and the implementation of the prototypes the possibility of implementing SOA for a remote modeling facility and knowledge dissemination is indicated. This was possible through

the development of a web based version for the hydrologic modeling tool called HBV and through the provision of an independent I-learning facility for the same model.

Key Words: Remote Modeling, Knowledge Dissemination, Ajax, Delphi WebBroker, I-learning, Service Oriented Architecture, HBV Model, WebHBV Model