For the past 6 months or so, we’ve been busily working away at the new Soil Quality website. We’ve been working with Dan Murphy et al at UWA, and have partnered with a long list of organisations to bring you the site (go and have a look at the site and check out all the associated parties … there’s a lot!).

The main purpose of the website is to teach farmers and producers about the importance of long term monitoring of the health of their soils. It does this through a number of tools that allow them to view characteristics of the soils in their regions, compare their soils to those in their region and to examine the relationships between various indicators. Each of these tools uses data that has been collected over the past few years by growers groups and organisations around the state.

Gruff

On a technical note, we’re quite proud of some of the work that we’ve done, particularly some of the graphing work. We used a modified version of the sensational gruff graphing engine to draw the pretty graphs. We had to create a scatter plot module, as well as a variation on the box and whisker graph. There’s a little bit of cleanup work to do, but hopefully we’ll be sending those modules in so that they can be added to the base library. We also plan to write a more detailed post on just how we used gruff to draw those pretty graphs!

There’s also a fair amount of number crunching going on in the background as well, with over 800 data points and upwards of 15 soil test results for each data point, there’s a lot of numbers to be moved around. Once again, the site was built using RubyOnRails, which continues to amaze us daily. The ease at which complicated data sets and soil test results could be manipulated was eye opening, and the flexibility of Ruby (and the Rails framework) allowed us to basically do what ever we wanted with the data.

The site was designed by the fine folk at The Globe, who also developed a logo for Soil Quality. A shout out to Nik for his tidy work.