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General Information about the DShip ActionLog and relationships with SENSOR and MCS

Historically the ActionLog was maintained by the officers on the bridge. This workflow persists for the standard Polarstern devices being in use for most of Polarstern cruises. All other deployments during expeditions have to be registered by the scientists themselves.

Every device operation of the scientific devices must be registered in the DSHIP Action Log and obtains a Device Operation ID. Log entries contain information on Date, Time, Longitude, Latitude amongst others. The devices available in DSHIP are imported from SENSOR.

ONLY devices entered in SENSOR which are set to 'public'  AND have the contact 'polarstern dship' with role 'dship connector' assigned will be imported into DSHIP and are available for logging device operations.

Device Operations in DShip are synchronized back to SENSOR where they can be found under 'Actions' (see picture below). This synchronisation will only be done few times a day.

How to use the DShip ActionLog

You may go directly to the DShip login via this link: http://dship1.fs-polarstern.de:8080/dship-web/

Or you may use the link on the Polarstern intranet: http://www.fs-polarstern.de/

In the opening page go to the bottom and press 'DShip V3'. Do not use the general login!

In the appearing login sheet enter your group account login which were assigned to the different groups. 

A login is required to register device operations in the ActionLog. Please clarify with the chief scientist which persons should receive this. The number should be kept as small as possible. 
Once the persons have been determined and instructed, the system administrator (sysman) creates the necessary accounts (username and password).

Once you are logged in, go to the left side further down to 'User pages' under which you will find a pre-defined page 'DShip_ActionLog'. If it is unintentionally deleted you may build it up again by going to 'Templates'.

If you want to enter a new device operation go to the little '+' sign in the menu below ActionLog Events.

The following page will appear:

Science activity and device operations

After choosing the right science activity according to your needs, the entry in the field device operation will show you the next automatically generated, available device operation ID. Then click in the field 'Device' and a dialog for entering you device will appear. You may choose your device out of the list or you simply type the beginning of the shortname of you device. The shortname of the device assigned in SENSOR applies! Only one device can be chosen. Close the dialog with 'Apply selection'.

If your device has associated subdevices you can decide whether they should be incorporated in the specific device operation. For instance a subdevice may be broken or simply not used in this special occasion so you may deselect this subdevice (see picture below).

Further down in the dialog you should choose an appropriate action for your device (see picture below). Only pre-defined actions are possible and some actions have been assigned to your device by best knowledge. However, you may wish to have more options for actions.  ONLY actions from following lists are available by convention. The recursive words describe the actions available in DShip while the bold ones in the beginning of each line are the ones associated in SENSOR. There are more possible action types in DShip than in SENSOR. Please find a way to cope with this. You need to come and see a data supporter for adding or removing DShip actions for your device.

deployment: at surface, deployed, in the water, max depth/on ground, profile start, station start, begin drilling, take off, recording start

recovery: profile end, released, station end, recovered, end drilling, on deck, landing, recording end

information: information

calibration: calibration

further possible DShip actions not associated with SENSOR: alter course, hoisting, lowering, in sight, comissioned, configuration, decomissioned, deployment, maintenance, mission, mount, partial failure, recovery, total failure, unmount

Most likely you will enter your device operations only after you come back from sampling / measuring in the field. Therefore you can enter the timestamp manually by clicking the calendar and the clock button. The system looks up the ship's position for the specific timestamp and will attach it to the device operation. If you want to use the current timestamp, press the button to the right. You can alter the timestamps later if something changed. The device operations are sorted according to timestamp NOT according to device operation ID , so if the device operation you entered was in the past it will appear somewhat further down in the table. Please note that to the very right of the page there are small buttons for several pages. You may have to scroll there, if you want to look up you device operation ID. However, in the lower table called ActionLog Activities the operations will be sorted according to device operation ID. You can also look up and edit your device operation choosing from either table using the little pen in the tools menu. Still timestamps can ONLY be changed by choosing from the upper table called ActionLog Events.

Adding new actions to you device operation

IMPORTANT!!!

If you want to enter several actions for the same device operation for instance 'station start' with a certain timestamp and 'station end' with a certain timestamp you do not choose 'New device operation' but look for your specific device operation in the drop down menu and add a new action for it. The new action then appears as a new line under the same device operation in the action log.

Closing device operations

Once you think you finished your device operation and think everything is fine, you may close it via editing the device operation and check the 'Close the device operation' entry. This will prevent the device operation from being unintentionally deleted. You may always be able to edit you device operation again by simply unchecking the 'Close device operation' entry again.

Filtering device operations

The table of device operations will become quite long and hard to overlook. It may therefore be convenient for you to filter the device operations and only look at you instruments. You can do this by using the filter button in the tools menu.

'Current expedition', 'All user groups' and every instrument will be marked by default in the appearing window. You need to leave it on 'All you groups' because you will not be able to filter according to your group. But you can deselect all instruments and then look up you devices in the list. Unfortunately, you have to search with a term within  the long name of your device here in opposite to the device operation itself which is connected to the shortname. For instance the device 'Ocean Bottom Seismographs' can not be found by entering the shortname 'OBS_PS' but by for instance 'bottom'.

You can also filter for the state of your device operation by using the drop down menu in the tools menu in the ActionLog. That makes sense in case you want to find unfinished device operations.

Editing Device Operations

see Modify entries in DSHIP

Extraction of DShip ActionLog

You can export the whole ActionLog as a csv-file using the little 'arrow up' button from the tools. It will be automatically deposited in the download folder of your computer. However there are nice ways to get extractions from the DShip ActionLog using following procedure:

• Go to the extraction tool dialog

• Choose 'ActionLog Extraction', in the following window chose start time and end time of the time span you want to extract and chose 'Events' from the 'Report' drop down menu (see picture), press 'Next' to get to the next window

• under device selection you can chose the devices for which you want to extract the device operations

• Press 'Next' to format the settings of your extraction (e.g. time format etc.).
• Press 'Next' to enter your user details and a file name for your extraction. Chose a user name you can remember!!! You do not have to enter an Email address if you do not want to.

• Finally press 'Send order' to get the extraction running.
• To get access to your extraction press 'Home' button and in the appearing page chose 'Extraction download'. You have to enter your previously chose user name here to get access to you extractions.

• Find you extraction under your user name. Click on the file name and see that three files are generated. Mostly, only the *.dat file will be of interest to you. Click on the *.dat file will download it to your downloads folder.