System Overview

• The system overview is as of June 2018.

Testing and Production Servers

The Open Data Impact Map has production and test servers running on Amazon EC2. The URLs of them are:

• Production: http://www.opendataimpactmap.org
• Testing: http://test.opendataimpactmap.org

Physical System Architecture

• An EC2 instance runs an Apache web server and MySQL database.
• Geospatial data of organizations are stored in the ArcGIS online database.

Code Architecture

• Webflow Files (Basic Website Files): Under the html folder, there are HTML files and other supporting folders. These basic files are implemented on and exported from Webflow.io.
• Survey Code (Survey Interface Files): html/survey. Since survey interfaces are implemented in PHP, the code was written separately from Webflow. This code is running on top of "Slim Framework," a light-weight PHP framework.
• Admin Code (Admin Interfaces): html/admin. Admin interfaces were implemented separately from other code, so has its own folder. The main JavaScript library that is used for the admin interface is DataTables.
• Map Code (Map Interface): html/app. The map visualization makes use of the Leaflet that uses ArcGIS APIs. This was implemented independently from other parts. This JavaScript code was used to be developed under the viz-src-archive folder and compressed using Gulp Compressor to minimize the JS file size. However, currently, the code is directly developed under the app folder (i.e., Gulp is not used for now, for convenience).
• migration_scripts: The PHP files under this folder is used once for cleaning up the broken data in the MySQL DB. No longer used for now.

Workflow

1. Guest users (organizations) do surveys using the survey interface (http://opendataimpactmap.org/survey). Then, the data is stored in the DB.
2. A researcher (admin user) looks at the data and clean the data up, then, marks it as "publish" when it's in a good shape.
3. Once a list of publishable records is ready, the admin user goes to the admin interface and migrates the survey data from the MySQL to the ArcGIS DB.
4. Once the migration is done, the new data is reflected on the map visualization on the website.