The last few years me and my fiancee have been working on a very interesting project. A project which I had the opportunity to watch it grow into something big and very important. The project was formerly known as CyCliDB which stands for Cyprus Climatological Database. Later on, since the aims and the capabilities of the project changed into something more global we gave it the name Bythos; a greek word which in English means profundity.

The aim of Bythos is to provide a rich internet application which enables oceanographers to visualize their data online. Initially, the project was destined for the CyODC (Cyprus Oceanographic Data Centre) but later on it was extended in order to support data provided by other centers. The next big challenge is to support multiple repositories through a single user interface. Ideally, each oceanographic centre will host its data while the frontend will be responsible for retrieving and combining these data.

The frontend of Bythos is totally based on Flex 2. Yahoo! Maps has been used as well but we had a hard time trying to make both work together. The backend is based on PHP5/Oracle XE and obviously the communication between frontend and backend is achieved through XML.

I would like to write more on this but I prefer to keep the post short. The following are some screenshorts of the first major version of Bythos.