Click here to watch DEIMS, a Drupal profile for ecological data

The International Long-Term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) a global network of research sites located in a variety of ecosystems in order to help understand environmental change across the globe. ILTER's focus is on long-term, site-based research and monitoring. ILTER member stations gather and record gigabytes of data each year.

ILTER can contribute to solving international ecological and socio-economic problems through question and problem-driven research, with its unique ability to design collaborative, site-based projects, to compare data from a global network of sites, and to detect global trends.

To fulfill its mission, ILTER needs a reliable, extensible platform for data storage, management, and distribution. In 2008, a handful of US-LTER sites and Oak Ridge National Lab developed the first version of the Drupal Ecological Information Management System (DEIMS) to provide a Drupal platform that sustains our research community.

In 2013, the DEIMS team collaborated with Palantir.net to improve the platform and create a Drupal 7 distribution that could be used by member institutions free of charge. Within DEIMS, we manage scientific information: data, metadata, catalogs, and directories. And we produce XML services using common metadata standards, such as ISO, EML and BDP. The platform includes data import, metadata creation and management, and a data explorer for querying external data sets.

During this case study, we'll explore three main aspects of the project, and try to show you how to achieve your audacious goals.

Inigo San Gil, Research Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico and the project sponsor, will introduce the business challenges and research goals of the project. Taking a high-level view, Inigo will walk through the project's genesis, how his team got major institutions to work together, and the vision that made the project a success.

Dave Reid, Senior Engineer at Lullabot, will walk through a technical overview of the project, with an emphasis on how to map requirements to Drupal functionality.

Sean Buscay, Senior Engineer and Team Lead at Palantir.net, will give an overview of how the project team worked together using an agile development process in order to provide the most value to the project and its sponsoring institutions.

The multi-speaker session will be moderated by Ken Rickard, Director of Development and Professional Services at Palantir.net.