Functional testing was undertaken to ensure that the software worked as designed and as described above under the section ‘Case study validation’. With the help of the comments of the researcher's colleagues, shown in Figure 6, he was able to feel confident about the accuracy of the collected data. The successful implementation of the HIS Referenced Time Series in HydroShare provides several equivalent or enhanced functionalities as compared to the original HIS and other generic and scientific data sharing platforms. These are summarized in Table 1. First, each HIS Referenced Time Series in HydroShare is available in the fully internationalized standard WaterML2 format while many current HIS time series are available only in the WaterML1.1 format. Each of the other systems only offers the data in the uploaded file format.
Table 1
Comparison between Existing HIS and the HydroShare HIS Referenced Time Series Data Type
| HydroShare Ref. Time Series (this paper) | HIS HydroServer Time Series (Tarboton et al. 2009) | DropBox (Drago et al. 2012) | PLOS ONE (MacCallum 2006) | iPlant (Goff et al. 2011) | D4Science.org (Assante et al. 2014) | FigShare (Singh 2011) | DataONE (Michener et al. 2012) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retrieval format | WML2, CSV and some WML1.1 | Some WML1.1 & some WML2 | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Native file format |
| Selective sharing | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Public resource collection | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discoverability | User-defined key words | Spatial location, variable, and time frame | N/A | Machine Aided Indexing identified key words | N/A | User-defined key words | User-defined key words | Geographic bounding box, date range, key words |
| Commenting: public resources | Yes | No | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes | No |
| private resources | Yes | No | Yes | N/A | No | No | No | No |
| Third-party application support | Web API | Desktop-based | Web API | Web API (retrieve only) | Web API | None | Web API | Web API |
| Automatic metadata extraction | Yes | N/A | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Standard time series specific metadata | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| HydroShare Ref. Time Series (this paper) | HIS HydroServer Time Series (Tarboton et al. 2009) | DropBox (Drago et al. 2012) | PLOS ONE (MacCallum 2006) | iPlant (Goff et al. 2011) | D4Science.org (Assante et al. 2014) | FigShare (Singh 2011) | DataONE (Michener et al. 2012) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retrieval format | WML2, CSV and some WML1.1 | Some WML1.1 & some WML2 | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Uploaded file format | Native file format |
| Selective sharing | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Public resource collection | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discoverability | User-defined key words | Spatial location, variable, and time frame | N/A | Machine Aided Indexing identified key words | N/A | User-defined key words | User-defined key words | Geographic bounding box, date range, key words |
| Commenting: public resources | Yes | No | N/A | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes | No |
| private resources | Yes | No | Yes | N/A | No | No | No | No |
| Third-party application support | Web API | Desktop-based | Web API | Web API (retrieve only) | Web API | None | Web API | Web API |
| Automatic metadata extraction | Yes | N/A | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Standard time series specific metadata | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
Figure 6
Comments from use case researcher and colleagues.