Design Decisions

Developing the best practices required to take a huge number of design decisions. There are many aspects that allow more than one solution and we expect that you will question the one or other decision we took. Well, great and we are more than happy to discuss each single one with you.

We started with analyzing the use cases. As a result, the design decision was taken:

(1) Keep everything as simple as possible Citizen science surveys cannot be compared with professional surveys that require extreme flexibility. In fact, most surveys are rather simple in nature, and you can be happy if the survey participants capture notes such as "water level extremely high due to recent severe rain events" or "most butterflies absent due to cold weather". Design decision (1) was implemented with the following details:

Whereever possible, perfer hard-typing over softyping Data serialization in XML can be performed following two different strategies. Hard-typing means that you define individual elements for all our objects in the schema. In contrary, soft-typing defines a record structure that allows you to define the elements at runtime. The following example illustrates the differences: