Definitions

This page contains definitions of terms and abbreviations used in the InfoEx application and associated documentation.

Assessment 

An assessment is one of two types of information exchanged in InfoEx. While an observation only contains objective information that was collected according to the OGRS of the Canadian Avalanche Association, an assessment contains personal judgment and interpretation of observations. Examples of assessments are general descriptions of the local snowpack, PWL assessments, avalanche problem descriptions and hazard assessments.

Operation PWL 

A persistent weak layer that was defined within the InfoEx system at the community level. The purpose of a Community PWL is to link Operation PWLs that refer to the same PWL to facilitate meaningful queries in reports.

ISSUE

Community PWLs can be defined and managed, however custom reports cannot currently be manipulated using community PWLs so the community PWLs are currently of limited value. JIRA: -540 (Mar.29, 2017)

Keyhole Markup Language (KML)

KML is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML is used in Google Earth to encode location geometries, which can be saved in two different file formats: the compressed KMZ file format and the uncompressed KML file format. The InfoEx system can only read uncompressed KML files.

Observation 

An observation is one of two types information exchanged in InfoEx. While an assessment contains personal judgment and interpretation, an observation only contains objective information that was collected according to the OGRS of the Canadian Avalanche Association. Examples of observations are weather, field, snowpack and avalanche observations.

Operation PWL 

A persistent weak layer that was defined within the InfoEx system by an individual operation. The propose of Operation PWLs is to allow operations to assess and track the conditions of local PWLs and associate observations to them.

OGRS 

Observation Guidelines and Recording Standards of the Canadian Avalanche Association. The most recent version of this standard was published in 2014 and is available to download at no cost from [1] the CAA website.

PWL 

Persistent weak layer

Report template 

A report template specifies the content of an InfoEx report.

Workflow 

Workflows are the functionality of the InfoEx application that allows users to define sequences of tasks that they regularly complete during the avalanche hazard assessment process and their interaction with the InfoEx. A workflow consist of a series of tasks or steps than can be chosen from a number of workflow modules. See Workflow overview for more details and examples.

Workflow instance 

A workflow instance is specific realization of a workflow. For example, every morning the guiding team of a backcountry operation complete a new instance of their morning meeting workflow.

Workflow module 

A workflow module is a software component of the InfoEx application that provides the necessary functionality for a task within workflow. For example, the report module offers users the ability to view any predefined InfoEx report within a workflow.

Workflow template 

A workflow template specifies the sequence of tasks or steps included in a workflow.