A software engineering experiment in software component generation
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Software engineering
Scientific workflow management and the Kepler system: Research Articles
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience - Workflow in Grid Systems
ROCR: visualizing classifier performance in R
Bioinformatics
Linking external components to a spatio-temporal modelling framework: Coupling MODFLOW and PCRaster
Environmental Modelling & Software
Environmental Modelling & Software
Map algebra and model algebra for integrated model building
Environmental Modelling & Software
Environmental Modelling & Software
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With the arrival of GPS, satellite remote sensing, and personal computers, the last two decades have witnessed rapid advances in the field of spatially-explicit marine ecological modeling. But with this innovation has come complexity. To keep up, ecologists must master multiple specialized software packages, such as ArcGIS for display and manipulation of geospatial data, R for statistical analysis, and MATLAB for matrix processing. This requires a costly investment of time and energy learning computer programming, a high hurdle for many ecologists. To provide easier access to advanced analytic methods, we developed Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET), an extensible collection of powerful, easy-to-use, open-source geoprocessing tools that ecologists can invoke from ArcGIS without resorting to computer programming. Internally, MGET integrates Python, R, MATLAB, and C++, bringing the power of these specialized platforms to tool developers without requiring developers to orchestrate the interoperability between them. In this paper, we describe MGET's software architecture and the tools in the collection. Next, we present an example application: a habitat model for Atlantic spotted dolphin (Stenella frontalis) that predicts dolphin presence using a statistical model fitted with oceanographic predictor variables. We conclude by discussing the lessons we learned engineering a highly integrated tool framework.