Water Ethics Web Engine: (WE)²

Welcome to the project repository for the Water Ethics Web Engine, (WE)², a web framework for ethical decision-making for smart water systems. This project repository accompanies the following manuscript (in review with the Journal of Hydroinformatics):

Ewing, G., and Demir, I.

An Ethical Decision-Making Framework with Serious Gaming: 
Smart Water Case Study on Flooding

Read or download the manuscript on EarthArXiv..

Content of repository

The code in this repository is the basis for a generalized serious gaming and analysis framework for ethical decision making. Subdirectories without an underscore, _, prepended to them are used to host a version of this framework on a webserver (such as app/, sampleBuild/, and template/.) Subdirectories with an underscore, _, prepended to them are supporting materials (such as _analytics and _database.)

Here you will find:

• _analytics/ contains a .py file and jupyter notebook to analyze results, learn data-driven models, and make decisions from them. The workflow presented is intended for post data collection,
• _database/ contains files to define and initialize our database schema,
• app/ contains the core code required to host a version of the ethics framework on a webserver,
• sampleBuild/ contains a simple operational example,
• template/ provides details on the structure of input files, and
• index.php is the landing page for the top level directory. This is does not direct users to gameplay.

Quickstart

To deploy the sampleBuild, follow these steps:

1. Initialize your database on a web-accessible server using the PostgreSQL CREATE scripts in _database,

   Note: Don't want to deal with setting up the database to log results at the moment? No worries, the user interface will look the same without it. (You just won't be able to see the aggregated results page.)

2. Locate the directories app/ and sampleBuild/ at the same level on a web server that is php-enabled,

3. Update app/php/database.php with the proper credentials and connection information.

Once this is done, use a browser to navigate to .../sampleBuild/ location. (We recommend Firefox or Chrome with this framework.) You should have a gameplay with the same functionality as this sampleBuild. To build your own application, make a new directory with the same structure as sampleBuild/.

A University of Iowa Hydroinformatics Lab Project