LifeLine "Simply Necessary"

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If you wish more information on LifeLine, drop us a line at info@harmeny.com

The 3 documents below provide an overview of LifeLine's query engine and report generation frameworks. LifeLine is released under the OpenSource^? MIT License. See LifeLineLicense.

LifeLine Tutorial : LifeLineAI2002Tutorial.pdf: LifeLine Tutorial -- Adventures of Joe and Yid

• This tutorial introduces how a planner would use LifeLine to develop management scenario's for natural resource data. The tutorial is presented as a humerous exchange between two characters, Joe (a planner) and Yid (a technical support person) with Yid gently introducing Joe to idea he can use LifeLine's "scenario" system to ask complex questions he would usually send away to tech-support.

LifeLine Web Mapping Presentation : EveryMapTellsAStory.ppt: Every Map Tells A Story: Mapping with LifeLine

• This presentation was given by Mishtu Banerjee and Tyler Mitchell in the summer of 2004, and illustrates LifeLine's support for Spatial Data via it's support for PostGIS (a Spatial Database) and MapServer (a web mapping system), allowing one to visualize the results of query's as maps.

LifeLine Report Reviewer Support : Report Reviewer Tutorial

• This tutorial introduces the LifeLine Report Reviewer. The Report Reviewer. built in Access, complements LifeLine's general querying capabilities, with a framework for rapidly building business oriented reports and charts with a uniform interface. The tutorial provides examples of several such reports and charts built around Inventory Data.

LifeLine is a system for building information applications from large natural resource databases or "inventories". As a system, it has a number of parts, some of which the user will see, and other's which are more oriented to developers. Also, since any system is really "parts in motion", it involves a process. The process is simply that required to consolidate a number of large natural resource databases so they can be used together, and to build on the raw data in these systems the kinds of summaries, reports, maps and visualizations a resource manager needs to do his jobs.

There are similar systems that are based on having to specify all the data and reports before-hand for an enterprise. The key advantage of LifeLine is that it functions more as a system-building toolkit. You don't have to know everything before hand. And as long as you follow LifeLine's design principles what you build today will work with what you build tommorow.

A big part of LifeLine's focus has been to develop a system that balances the technical needs of developers for tools that speed up their work, and the need for end-user's for a simple, visually oriented framework for working with data in a resource planning and managment context. By providing a "system building toolkit" rather than a canned pre-defined "enterprise system" it is hoped to give organizations more control over their data and how it is utilized.

You are not forced to abandon your existing data systems, but can build atop them. You can grow the systems in new directions over time, rather than being locked into a pre-existing model of what data and reports are needed. Develop as you learn. Learn as you go.

So what are the parts and processes in the LifeLine system:

For the Developer

• LifeLine Design Principles. A unique modelling process, the "LifeLine Design Principles"". Following the LifeLine design principles results in a data model of your resource information. Models following LifeLine Design Principles can then be rapidly implemented based on the custom tools we've developed for data-cleanup, data loading, and for data viewing, querying, reporting. The Design Principles should make it possible for a developer to build fairly complex databases that meet "good database design criteria", such as "normalization" and "aliasing" and "referential integrity", while not having to be an expert in relational database design.

• LifeLine Developer Tools. These tools support data models designed according to the principles above. The tools basically automate those things a careful database developer would do in building a custom database: tools to check data quality, tools to automate model generation, tools to automate loading new data into the data model.

• LifeLine Data Generators. These are custom algorithms to manipulate data, usually tied to a specific data model. What they allow is the automation of many data compilation activities common in resource inventories. Often it is the "compiled" rather than the "raw" data that user's are trained to interpret in a management or planning context. Examples in forestry are "Stand Tables" , "Inventory Labels", etcetera.

• LifeLine Certification. There are 6 modules in the certification program that take one through development of design principles to using the software, to modifying and customizing the software. Do you need to be certified? Of course not. Then why certify? Certification is a guarantee of having learned a system to a particular standard. In this case, the standard begins with a thorough understanding of object-oriented and relational data modelling principles, a strong methodology for organizing and processing data to create integrated data-bases, and an understanding of basic exploratory data analysis systems, so one can generate visual reports to turn data into pictures that are not simply "pretty", but statistically informative.

For Planners and Managers

• LifeLine User Interface. This is a non-technical interface that allows a non-technical user to rapidly query and view data, without having to know anything about database mechanics. It's focussed around the idea of a person developing a "management scenario" based on the information they want, and then being able to save, export, store and combine these management scenarios.

• LifeLine Report Reviewer. This is another non-technical interface, focussed on allowing the user to view custom, often graphically oriented reports. Again, it is focussed around the idea of management scenarios. For the user, what it provides is a very simple framework in which reports can be viewed and customized. For the developer, it provides an environment for rapidly developing reports with a standardized look and feel. The reports could be as simple as data summaries by area, maps that highlight selected data, or complex forecasting models. A user can handle these very different kinds of data summary processes with a common, easy to understand interface. To make life easier for the user, the Report Reviewer also has a standard tutorial template that describes how to use the application in general. Then, as new reports are added, guidelines on how to interpret each new report is simply added to the tutorial.

For Your IT Department

While we've focussed on the Developer who creates the information applications, and the user who puts them to work, in making decisions, there is a final player in the process: The System Adminstrator . This person is sometimes the developer, but often a person who is more the custodian and maintainer of completed applications. For them, LifeLine provides the ability to have a number of custom applications to meet different user's needs -- but where these applications "under the hood" are all rather similar. This eases the System Adminstitor's burdon. They meet the user's need for diversity of applications, while meeting their own need for maintaining as few systems as possible.

LifeLine's development as a system has focussed on the needs of those working with resource databases. However many aspects of the system should be tranferable to other domains where one needs to integrate and report on data that may be residing in multiple databases. LifeLine itself is evolving as a system, and input from BOTH developers and end user's of LifeLine applications is vital to ensure the system has sufficient flexibility and automation to make a developer's life easier, and provides a natural way for a planner or manager to work with data.

For Your Organization

• Take Control of Your Data. Instead of spending your $ and staff time, trying to shoe-horn your system into someone else's view of how your business should work -- take control of your information, and customize LifeLine's tools to your needs. LifeLine is open source software -- so you have freedom to change the system to accomodate your business case. The modelling principles behind LifeLine, allow it to "ride" atop a corporate database, providing a simpler, more business object's oriented view of data, and allowing various database systems to be presented through a simple, common user interface for query and exploration.

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For origins of LifeLine, see LifeLineHistory.

For a general discussion area, see LifeLineNet

For a more terse technical overview of LifeLine's components see LifeLineFramework^?

-- Original: MishtuBanerjee July 21, 2004

-- Updated: MishtuBanerjee - 26 Oct 2004

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