IWICOS - Integrated Weather, Sea Ice and Ocean Service System. Revised system design and user requirements

The overall objective of IWICOS is to develop a prototype marine information system that will provide a single-entry access to integrated meteorological, sea ice and oceanographic (met-ice-ocean) products in electronic form, and to demonstrate this prototype for a group of users working in fisheries, sea transport, exploitation of marine resources in Northern European waters, or whose work is related to sea ice monitoring on a scientific or pre-operational basis.
In IWICOS, user requirements have been obtained from: (a) previous RTD projects where user requirements for sea ice information were studied in the Baltic Sea, in Greenland Waters and in the Northern Sea Route, involving a selection of representative users from public sector and commercial enterprises, (b) a design workshop held in April 2000, where a group of invited users provided additional input for the IWICOS prototype, and (c) a dedicated survey of user requirements that was carried out in Iceland.
The initial design of the IWICOS system architecture was successfully implemented using standard data representation and system interaction protocols, and consisted of subsystems for Production, Brokering and Presentation.
The design of the End-User System was refined into two smaller subsystems, the Façade and the Client Software. The Façade is a communication link between Producer subsystems, the Broker and the Client Software, which is the program running on the end-user's computer giving access to the IWICOS products. Depending on the type of client (thin, thick and balanced) and the type of communication used (high vs. low bandwidth), the Façade has different responsibilities to optimise the load distribution between this subsystem and the Client Software. After the baseline period ended, some minor design changes have been made to Client Software. These changes are additions and refinements of earlier design, as more user requirements were implemented.