discussion / Software and Mobile Apps  / 28 March 2019

Data integration platforms

Anyone working in data integration or know of any other existing tools such as Palantir or Vulcan's EarthRanger?




The Sensing Clues Wildlife Intelligence platform is especially designed to facilitate data integration from silos and to make the various types of data sources instantly analysable. The toolkit is based on serious industry standards and established solution providers and made available for free to field partners involved in nature conservation and wildlife protection. If you are interested, I can give you a demo,

Hello,

I'm the program manager for Vulcan's EarthRanger.

What we've found is that, unfortunately, there are no standards for these data.  We've integrated with 30 different devices and are adding more every month.  In an ideal world, all of these devices would leverage a common communication mechanism.  I think there's an opportunity for the community to enact this at least among wildlife trackers - and I think we should (Steph - plug for OpenCollar!).  However, a number of tracking solutions are commercially available GPS devices that are being applied for animal tracking, and it'd be very difficult / time consuming to convince numerous commercial companies to adopt a standard for wildlife.

In the meantime, our approach is to generally be open to working with anyone.  We integrate incoming feeds that are needed by our partner protected areas, and also publish APIs to allow partners to perform the integrations themselves.