The structure of this database reflects the entities encountered when sampling watercourses and testing those samples for various qualities.
A group of samplers (taxonomy: Stewards) chooses a day to go out (content type: Field Trip) to visit several locations (content type: Sampling Site) of a watercourse (taxonomy: Waterbody), which can be of various types (taxonomy: Waterbody Type), for the purpose of extracting from it a small amount of the water flowing there (content type: Water Sample), which may or may not be part of a project (taxonomy Project), and then
- describes notable conditions (field: Remarks) such as precipitation pertaining to the field trip,
- describes in general the physical conditions of the water at time and site of sampling (fields: Depth, Colour, Odour, Algae) and of the relevant surroundings (field: Remarks),
- takes photographs illustrating these,
- applies hand-held meters to determine certain analyte values (webform: Analyte),
- delivers the day's samples to a laboratory to determine selected analyte values (webform: Analyte).
A Field Trip is conducted by a specific group of Stewards, therefore:
- two Field Trips on the same day are distinguished by the group of Stewards conducting them.
- samples from separate days constitute separate Field Trips, even when sent together for analysis.
The full identification of a sampling location is a concatenation of:
- Waterbody + Waterbody Type + Sampling Site
e.g, Waterbody Creighton Type Creek Site at mouth into Bessette
Webform 'Analyte' is embedded in Content Type 'Water Sample'; thus when new Water Sample content is added to the database, the webform is added with it so that analytes can later be posted to that sample. The webform can be subsequently posted manually, analyte by analyte, or by importing several analytes at once from a .CSV file.
* Internal coding of entities
Water bodies have both a name, like 'Mid Shuswap' and a type, like 'River'. Water bodies are given a two capital letter code, e.g. 'MS' for Middle Shuswap. Within each water body the sites are given a two digit numeric code, such that their numbers increase upstream, from '00' at the mouth, with '1#' in midstream, to '2#' higher in the watershed, allowing '3#' for sites near the source.