Round up of findings and suggested next steps for discussion.
Two possible sources of data have been identified which could either act as an initial (or potentially an ongoing) source of data.
The next step will be to understand what is available from these sources, how complete they are and look at the best way to transform the data.
We would advise conducting some 'discovery' user testing to help understand what users of the system require and validate any current assumptions. Increasing the amount of metadata directly affects the burden on updating so we need to be careful to limit to absolutely required fields in order to make it a simple as possible.
New data can be added in the future as required, but it tends to be much more difficult to remove data once it is in use.
A lot of choices around users and permissions will be dependent on other decisions, particularly on work to understand data sources. At a high level however the more granular control that is required over what users can do and the larger the number of them the more complexity is introduced. This then increases the development time and burden of administrating the system
Like the users there are a lot of dependencies on other questions, but once we understand what data needs to be included and what queries we need we can then look at the best way to model this data and make sure if performs efficiently.
We should look at how users will make use of the ability to query and/or visualise. This can probably be the same research as suggested for answering the questions around metadata.
Following this we can create a prototype for how this will look and function. Some of the page templates used will likely be very similar to the editor, particularly around finding datasets to view or edit. Using the same approach will help users who use both parts, but can also decrease the complexity of building the system.