General Services

Fireflower provides a general cataloging and storage service that helps organize data. Every item recorded by Fireflower is automatically referenced, and can later be searched and retrieved from facilities provided. Data accountability is provided by audit trails that record when data is first entered, and/or changed, and who was involved.

The data sharing service keeps track of who owns each piece of data in the system, and allows the owners of data to set rules to allow different third parties to have access to parts of their data.

Fireflower provides data services for:

• collection
• collation
• classification
• integration
• correlation
• analysis
• search
• retrieval
• and secure storage of data

Users control their own data absolutely. Users will not lose data as a result of a catastrophe, because data is stored and mirrored at distant locations. Fireflower data storage facilities are secure and provide the option to store a user’s data in an encrypted form.

Fireflower provides services which are particularly suitable for use in the following fields:

• General Academic Work
• Environmental Research and Teaching
• Biomedical Research and Teaching

Convenience

A user’s own data sets are always available. Because of the centralization of data, sharing data with others is quick and seamless. Data does not have to move physically. An owner can simply allow a second person to see parts of his/her data instantly because all users use the same virtual server.

Different languages are available at the user interface so that users can work with a language they are comfortable with, and facilities are available to toggle from one language to another in many situations.

Underlying Philosophy

Since all events in the universe occur in space and time, all events within a particular space should be able to be classified, integrated, and monitored with changes in time. Similarly, events occurring at a particular time should be able to be classified, integrated, and related to relevant spaces.

In Fireflower spaces are called ‘sites’. A site is anything that can be described in two or three dimensions by numerical co-ordinates. A site could be cosmological (a galaxy), geographical (a mountain range), architectural (a castle), anatomical (a plant leaf) or cytological (a chromosome, or even a gene or molecule).

A site does not need to be stationary; it could move in time (a whale or an aircraft). Sites can be nested, one within another, in a parent-child hierarchy (thus a lake can be the parent of a small bay in the lake), but sites may have multiple parents if they occur in more than one hierarchy (the same lake can appear in different hydrological and fisheries hierarchies).

The Olga's - Central Australia - an important Aboriginal 'site'