Introduction¶
- Phoenix (the bird)
- Phoenix is a long-lived bird that is cyclically regenerated or reborn. (Wikipedia). [..]
Pyramid Phoenix is a web-application build with the Python web-framework pyramid. Phoenix has a user interface to make it easier to interact with Web Processing Services. The user interface gives you the possibility to register Web Processing Services. For these registered WPS services you can see which Processes they have available. You are provided with a form page to enter the parameters to execute a process (job). You can monitor the jobs and see the results.
In the climate science community many analyses are using climate data in the NetCDF format. Phoenix uses the Malleefowl WPS which provides processes to access NetCDF files from the ESGF data archive. Malleefowl provides a workflow process to chain ESGF data retrieval with another WPS process which needs NetCDF data as input. Phoenix has a Wizard to collect the parameters to run such a workflow with a process of a registered WPS.
Phoenix should help developers of WPS processes to use their processes more conveniently, especially for feeding their processes with different data sources (like ESGF data archive). Phoenix is also used for demonstration of available WPS processes.
Phoenix has a more generic and technical user interface. To use Phoenix successfully you need to have some knowledge about WPS and the existing data archives. So, Phoenix might not become a good choice for scientists users who just want to run a specific analyses job. There are other climate portals available which address these users. But Phoenix should at least become developer friendly.
Phoenix is easy to install using the anaconda python distribution and buildout. So, Phoenix is not only available on production sites where it is close to data archives. You can also install it on your developer machine to make testing of your developed WPS processes easier and to present them to other people.