WHAT IS HYDRODESKTOP? WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? AND WHEN WILL IT WORK ON A MAC?

The growing number of CUAHSI HIS HydroServers world-wide presents a unique opportunity to explore tools and techniques for efficient client -side data discovery and download. This presentation will describe the design and development of an open source desktop GIS enabled HIS software tool called HydroDesktop and the open source software development web portal, www.hydrodesktop.org, which supports community development and maintenance of the software. HydroDesktop is a desktop software application and search and discovery tool for exploring the distributed network of HIS servers, do wnloading specific data series, visualizing and summarizing data series and exporting these to formats needed for analysis by external software. HydroDesktop is based on the open source DotSpatial GIS developer toolkit (www.DotSpatial.org) which provides i t with map- based data interaction and visualization, as well as an extensive plug -in interface that can be used by third party developers and researchers to easily extend the software using Microsoft .NET programming languages.