As of January, NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO) is a no-paper zone when it comes to trip reports and permits.
And while the move to digital is driven by policy, it’s made possible through a new, cloud-based back-end system that has the promise of simplifying the process for going electronic across NOAA Fisheries. Created by in-house developers at GARFO, the Electronic Document Data Interface (EDDI) enables all data submitted from any online form—through virtually any app—to be seamlessly processed, integrated, and entered into the GARFO database. This not only enhances speed and accuracy and reduces costs; it also allows staff to focus on their areas of expertise.
“The highly knowledgeable people whose job it is to interpret the data are now not wasting time ripping open envelopes and trying to decipher poorly filled-out forms,” notes Torey Adler, Software Development Manager for GARFO’s Technology and Data Management Division.
EDDI lead developer Evert Jan van't Land recognizes the back-end work isn’t what generally gets the attention in electronic data collection, but stresses that one can’t happen without the other. “It’s hard to make people understand why core infrastructure is important,” he says. “But if you want the shiny stuff and you want it to be fast, cheap, and effective, you need the infrastructure. It’s the foundation for every app in the future that we develop.”
What makes EDDI so impactful is its ability to automatically validate—or check the accuracy, quality, and completeness of—source data input by users like vessel captains. Once a form, such as an electronic vessel trip report, has been validated, the information it contains is considered trusted for processing. If there’s an error, EDDI immediately notifies the user and flags which form fields need to be corrected. This way, errors can be fixed quickly and effectively, by the user, before they get transferred to the database and cause delays in data processing and evaluation. Further, the system does this seamlessly in the background. As van't Land quips, “If nobody knows it’s there, it’s working.”
Among its key benefits is the fact that EDDI is compatible with an array of government and third-party apps, and can be used for various transaction types. So instead of having to shoehorn themselves into using a rigid template to create online forms, app developers can compete to build better products using custom interfaces as long as they adhere to a core set of validation standards. This built-in flexibility is an asset in and of itself for NOAA Fisheries. “We are hoping to share the system with other regions if the opportunity arises,” Adler says. “It’s designed to be something that could be expanded beyond GARFO.”
Another strength of the system is its cloud-based technology. Rather than relying on local servers whose downtime can stall everything from data input to processing, working on the cloud means that even if the GARFO servers are down, users can still enter, upload, and sometimes even view their data.
EDDI was developed with support from NOAA’s Fisheries Information System program, a state-regional-federal partnership promoting sound, science-based fisheries management. In addition to providing financial resources to projects through a competitive Request for Proposals process, FIS convenes cross-disciplinary teams that collaborate to address pressing fisheries-dependent data issues. “The FIS grant was crucial in the development of EDDI,” says Adler, “not only from a funding standpoint but also in terms of intellectual support and credibility.”
