DigitalOcean Technology

Technology: DigitalOcean runs on a robust, open-source content management system; DO builds on existing modules to leverage community support; DO always looks to support community-based standards for data interoperability; DO links its core system to partner systems using their shared APIs; DO will extend Flash data animation for thousands of marine protected areas; DO will allow community programmers to enhance its system through the DO standards-based API. DigitalOcean is not an expensive new technology development effort. Rather, it is an existing technology extension and deployment effort.

Content: DigitalOcean content collections will be seeded with high quality content from core members and partners; DO communities will add content to the system and value to the content; DO content will be licensed for reuse; DO content will include, photographs, videos, data, science results, critiques of science, citation collections, job listings, and a range of peer-to-peer interactions facilitated by the social network software.

Drupal CMS
The DigitalOcean project examined several leading open-source content management systems (CMS). At the review matrix (see: Appendix) reveals, Drupal (http://drupal.org/) offered the best combination of existing features and active community programming support for new features. Drupal (the word means “drop”—as in water drop— in Dutch) is a full featured, award-winning CMS and provides a host of services out of the box. Drupal runs on a wide range of servers (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) using IIS or Apache and PHP with either mySQL or postgreSQL. In short it is well compatible with standard standard webservice database setups.

DO will stand up as many instances of Drupal as required to service multiple communities and projects, while preserving interoperability of all DO data and user signups. The current version, Drupal 6.5, supports unicode for international deployment. The ECOS Social Network will take advantage of Drupal core technology and additional modules provided by key partners, such as OuThink Media, to handle video resources. The DO Drupal team will expand existing Drupal resources that support Creative Commons licensing, georeferencing metadata, structured tagging, KML export to Google Earth, and semantic coding.