1. The Structure of the Web Site

The typhoon is a global-scale meteorological phenomenon. To capture such a global-scale phenomenon both in a macroscopic scale and in a microscopic scale, it is important to have the record of the phenomenon through a lot of eyes that see it. Many events occur simultaneously at many places as the typhoon makes a move. The understanding of the whole picture is therefore not an easy task.

To deal with such diverse, multi-faceted information, this Web site is designed to have four regions of information as follows (Detail in Eyephoon: Concept).

Direct (Primary Information) Indirect (Secondary Information)
Public Satellite Images / AMeDAS Data / Fixed-point Observation Typhoon News Topics
Personal Eyephoon Typhoon Front Typhoon News Weblog

In short, these four regions of information can be understood by the combination of two dimensions; direct / indirect and public / personal dimensions. In particular, "personal" information sometimes has the problem of reliability because information has not gone through the review process by other people. Hence information in each region should be understood in its own context.

Finally, this Website is divided into two domains as follows.

  1. digital-typhoon.org (agora.ex.nii.ac.jp)
  2. eye.tc

About the separation of two domains, the information of which contents cannot be guaranteed is provided from the second domain (eye.tc).

2. Hardware / Software

The system of Digital Typhoon and Eyephoon consists of five servers at this moment. The number of servers is only for the Web site, and other servers are processing data to be submitted to the Web site.

Those servers uses Intel 32bit processor family (single / dual) on which Linux (RedHat / Fedora Core) is installed. The major software packages running on Linux are Apache, Perl, PostgreSQL, and Libxml2.