OBIS: getting started

Access and data overview

OBIS can be found under http://www.future-okavango.org/obis. Opening it in your favourite web browser you are greeted with the following screen:

Two menus (marked in red) offer access to various generic functions (top menu) and data types (left menu).

User account

As a default, users are logged in automatically as a guest user. In OBIS, the guest user account already allows to access a variety of functions, including

• searching for / displaying meta-information of most stored data
• visualizing interactive maps and previews of geospatial data
• displaying previews of time series graphs and images

The guest user is not allowed to access and download detailed information such as time series or geodata. The same holds for accessing restricted and account specific functions like language settings (the guest user uses English language). For an individual dataset, specific permissions may have been defined by the dataset owner and such might differ from default settings.

Throughout this tutorial, a user account with typical permission settings will be used. To login with your account, select the Login/-out link from the top menu. Please fill your user credentials into the form as shown in the image below:

If you don't have an account yet, please select the Request new user account link from the same page and provide the required information in the following form as shown here:

Please carefully fill in the information about Affiliation and Request notice as the permissions granted by the OBIS administrator will be based on and justified by these data. Upon submitting the data, an OBIS administrator is notified about your request. Your account will usually be created within one day and your user credentials will be sent to you via an automated email.

Once you have successfully logged in, your currently used user account is displayed at below the main menu, e.g. Logged in as: nsk. In case you are experiencing problems accessing data, please remember to check if the user account shown here is the one you intend to use. To change your user account settings like password, email address or preferred language, select the Account link from the top menu.

Generic concepts and user interfaces

OBIS allows to store, manage and visualize a number of different data types, e.g. time series data and geodata. In many cases, a single dataset conists of more than one element. As an example, a geodata dataset may consist of

• a metadata description of that dataset
• one or more documents containing the real data or preview images of them
• a map layer to be used to display interactive maps in through the OBIS mapserver