Developing a Cyberinfrastructure for integrated assessments of environmental contaminants

The objective of this study was to design and implement prototype software for capturing field data and automating the process for reporting and analyzing the distribution of mercury. The four phase process used to design, develop, deploy and evaluate the prototype software is described. Two different development strategies were used: (1) design of a mobile data collection application intended to capture field data in a meaningful format and automate transfer into user databases, followed by (2) a re-engineering of the original software to develop an integrated database environment with improved methods for aggregating and sharing data. Results demonstrated that innovative use of commercially available hardware and software components can lead to the development of an end-to-end digital cyberinfrastructure that captures, records, stores, transmits, compiles and integrates multi-source data as it relates to mercury.