The yhedn project has already made a great deal of progress. The current status is set out below both in finances and according to the phased roadmap objectives.
Natural England has provided some funding to progress the roadmap and work is underway to find the necessary match funding from local authorities, strategic regional bodies such as the Regional Assembly and Yorkshire Futures and other regional bodies with statutory obligations such as Yorkshire Water.
Many of the existing recording bodies in the region are well established and we need to be wary of not undermining any existing funding they may have. As such the harmonisation phase is probably the most difficult to progress.
Draft contracts have been developed in consultation with the NBN Trust. These are based on published guidelines issued by the NBN detailing the core services which an LRC should offer.
Following the consultation process which culminated in the publication of the roadmap document, regular meetings were set up, led by Ben McCarthy (the Regional Biodiversity Coordinator) and attended by the representatives of all the region's LRCs as well as Oliver Grafton (NBN Trust) and John Newbould (Yorkshire Naturalist's Union). The main issues in progressing the roadmap arising from these meetings fall into 2 main categories funding and staffing:
In 2006 a consortium of the LRCs took on a project again funded by Natural England (then RDS) to update the regional lowland grassland inventory. This project was seen as a pilot for the regional network.
Although the 1st phase of the project has not yet been completed, some progress has already been made towards the 2nd phase.
The Humber Environmental Data Centre started work on a project in 2005 to bring together data from different sources and present them using a single interface.
The technology developed by this project has formed the basis for the 2nd - "integration" phase of the roadmap process. A pilot website has been set up and a number of initial services have been developed which collate data from a number of different sources but more work is required to turn these template services into a robust finished product. More information about the underlying technologies can be found in the technology section above.
Currently, integrated services source data from NEYEDC and HEDC aswell as any data from NBNGateway including data from National Schemes and Societies.
Again - some progress has already been made towards the 3rd phase. The NEYEDC server is currently storing data for NEYEDC, HEDC and Rotherham BRC.
We are currently investigating the possibility of using a hosted database server to replace the need for internal servers in NEYEDC, HEDC, LERC and Rotherham BRC.
The use of a hosted server will give us guaranteed availability, and a robust managed back-up strategy.
Buying servers in-house has a number of draw-backs not least that it requires a large capital outlay, the servers depreciate quickly and need a regular replacement strategy. Availability and back-up guarantees are costly if managed in-house. The largest problem is capacity planning. In buying a server in-house you have to be able to predict the demand for the service in 3-5 years time. Even if you buy additional disks or memory later the machine has to have space to plug these into.
A hosted server provides a solution to all of these problems. If requirements change over time memory, disk space, more processors or even an entirely new server can be provided almost instantly simply by altering the contract and incremental additions to the monthly cost.