The Hydrophone Data Repository (Hydra)
Funders: UW, NOAA, US-ACE, UC-Davis, Seattle City Light, and more
Hydra has been online since 2008 and was Sound Data's first online database project. Hydra provides data management and sharing for fisheries researchers who study the movement of aquatic animals using acoustic telemetry. Hydra has enjoyed tremendous success, growing from a grassroots regional solution to serve more than 200 researchers from across the west coast of North America.
From Hydra's about page:
Around the Pacific Northwest, researchers from a variety of federal and local agencies, universities, and tribes in aggregate are using several hundred hydrophones to conduct research studies on movement patterns of aquatic animals. Each research program is characterized by numerous tagged animals that move and a relatively limited number of acoustic receivers that are located to address a significant question for individual programs. Importantly, these tagged animals move over larger domains than individual receiver arrays. These researchers have recognized the value of coordinating placement of hydrophones to improve their collective listening capability and ability to address emergent, larger-scale management questions. Researchers needed the ability to efficiently share detections of each others tag codes to enable the larger research collaboration. Hydra was developed to facilitate data sharing and research coordination for these researchers. The researchers were happy with Hydra's service so they told their colleagues who are also doing acoustic telemetry about Hydra and they joined too. Currently Hydra extends from British Columbia to Baja California.
California Energy Data and Reporting System (CEDARS)
Client: California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) Energy Division (ED)
Sound Data has handled every aspect of the CEDARS project since its inception, including developing and articulating client business processes, change management, system requirements, security requirements, platform specification, software development, testing, client management, and automation of data integration between disparate data systems. CEDARS goals are to automate manual data processing and quality control tasks that have been time consuming, expensive, and error prone, to communicate transparent data specification and quality control rules, to be robust to change over time, and to integrate what had been disparate data sets to enable analysis and review; the CEDARS project has been highly successful, delivering multiple modules on-time despite tight deadlines, and the CPUC continues to expand the scope of CEDARS. CEDARS also accomplished the high-level goals of integrating with the CPUC Database for Energy Efficiency Resources (DEER) for purposes of claim and filing data validation, as well as integrating with the CPUC Cost Effectiveness Tool (CET) for purposes of calculating cost effectiveness of the portfolio.
Advanced Energy Community Funding Product Catalog
Client: California Energy Commission (CEC)
Sound Data designed and created a custom database and website that provides project developers with information about funding opportunities available to them if they include sustainability features in their new construction and building rehabilitation projects. This effort was part of an Advanced Energy Community project funded by the CEC that helps create more efficient communities by incorporating energy efficiency, demand response, storage enabled distributed generation and electrification of transportation into construction projects in the commercial market.
We designed the funding product catalog database architecture to enable funding products to be matched to projects through a relational database based on funding product characteristics and each project’s unique attributes. We provided quality control and assurance on the funding product data; we also transformed and normalized data. We migrated the database between software as the project matured and moved online.
We created the funding product catalog website with open source tools and posted the source code online for public access. We included content management system pages within the website; content for those pages was created by, and is maintained by, community stakeholders. We created the solution as a prototype, intended to be used by other communities.
