Example:
The eRiskZone Portal
(An On line System for Engineering Consulting Services
)
Designing buildings or
industrial facilities in seismic prone areas is
a complex and time consuming process. Seismic Hazard must be evaluated
and geotechnical site conditions must be considered for local
amplification effects. Highly specialized experts in this field are not
easily available, especially in some countries, and data about seismic
catalogues and geological conditions must be updated on a continuous
basis. These are strong motivations to make desirable such a consulting
service available to the majority of the designers.
The eRiskZone portal is aiming
at putting in contact engineering
consulting companies with potential clients (mainly structural
engineers and architects) seeking design advices. A practical on-line
software (called AESP: Automatic Engineering Service Provider)
available on the portal requests all the information necessary to
perform a simplified seismic risk analysis, provides preliminary
results to the user and offers more accurate investigations on demand,
to be carried out off-line through a human-based activity, at the
central design office.
The Client interacts with the AESP through the eRiskZone
If the Client decides to order
the offered off-line consulting service
then a negotiation will take place. In that case all the
gathered
information would be transmitted to the CDO (Central Design Office)
where the consulting service will be performed by real experts in the
field.
As a result of the consulting
service a report will be delivered to the
Client electronically signed by the author (the engineering
consultant), who takes full legal responsibility on the correctness of
the results. The report will contain also a trace of the quality
verification procedures applied to ensure to the Client a standard
quality level.
Meanwhile, the eRiskZone also
provides some other necessary services.
For example, the portal provides a certification that all the companies
offering services through it are regular members of the Chamber of
Commerce, and the professionals are listed in the official professional
associations. Their expertise and experience can be inspected through
records available through the portal.
The eRiskZone portal is a Web
Service implemented through Jetspeed and
is basically a collection of portlets. Jetspeed is an Open Source
implementation of an Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and XML.
Portlets are specialized servlets that plug into and run in
portals. Portlets are designed to be aggregatable in the larger
context of a portal page. They rely on the portal infrastructure
to function. Moreover the eRiskZone portal uses PHP and MySQL for
the deployed applications implementing the services offered to the
Client.
The eRiskZone portal screen
The eRiskZone Portal can be tried on line
http://www.eriskzone.net
