Remote modeling and knowledge dissemination across Internet

At this era planning, designing, developing and managing water resource systems certainly involvesystem simulation and impact prediction. This is because the tasks of planning, designing andmanaging of water resource can conveniently be done using hydroinformatics modeling andsimulation tools. Nonetheless, these tools are not equally available for everybody. Especially, there isa serious lack of these tools in developing countries. The shortage is mainly driven by two conditions.The first is lack of financial resources for the purchase of these tools, which usually are expensive.The second is lack of knowledge and awareness about the capabilities of modeling tools. Practitionersand educators in developing countries either do not know the existence of the state of the art tools orthey lack the skills to use them.One way to solve these problems is to avail the modeling tool services over the Internet. This willundoubtedly cut the costs when compared to buying the HI tool package. It is apparent thatintroducing and establishing a facility for remote modeling and knowledge distribution over theInternet will undoubtedly benefit portions of the world with lack of knowledge, skill, modelingsystems and other resources. This is directly related to MDG 8 target 18 i.e. ""In cooperation with theprivate sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information andcommunications"". In this case the research focuses on the use the benefits web technologies andInternet to avail modeling tools and other knowledge resources which will have number of indirectcontributions to other goals and targets. However, establishing such a facility requires a shift from thewell established practice of delivering modeling software as a package to a new more convenientway of delivering modeling softwares and packages as a service online using the advances in ICT.Here there are several questions one can raise, like how to make it possible to use a remotely locatedmodeling tool over the Internet and permit remote modeling and knowledge dissemination practice?Are there sufficient technologies to support this? Are the existing HI tools suitable for web basedapplication?In spite of all foreseen advantages of implementing remote modeling and knowledge distributionsystems their wide implementation and adaptation is hampered because of several knowledge gapsand technical problems. This research is carried out with the objectives of identifying problems inadapting of existing modeling systems for distributed use over Internet, identifying availability andlimitations of technologies and suggesting solution to the identified problems. Moreover, the studyalso intends to implement prototypes to prove that the suggested solutions are practical.In this research available Web technologies with the potential for development of remote modelingfacilities were explored and compared. It is shown that there are many web technologies available fordevelopment of remote modeling facilities, even though, their performance greatly varies. From thedifferent available technologies Delphi WebBroker and Ajax were selected for further studies and totest their applicability for the implementation of the selected prototypes. In the research twoprototypes are implemented one to test the requirements and adaptability of existing HI tools fordistributed and remote modeling use and another one to see the applicability of remote knowledgedissemination. The advantages and disadvantages of Delphi WebBroker and Ajax technologies areshown based on the performance of the two prototypes. The prototypes performance is comparedbased on functional and non functional requirements. Ajax seems to reduce response time since it hasminimum page reloading. WebBroker has a better security and stability than Ajax.Through this research and the implementation of the prototypes the possibility of implementing SOAfor a remote modeling facility and knowledge dissemination is indicated. This was possible throughthe development of a web based version for the hydrologic modeling tool called HBV and through theprovision of an independent I-learning facility for the same model