PacFIN Brief for 1995

[Complete 1995 PSMFC Annual Report (455 KB pdf)]

January 1995 saw the staff of the PacFIN office continuing the process started during 1994 of transferring the PacFIN system from the B7900 to the Orca computing platform. The Orca platform is the Unix server system running the Oracle database management system purchased by the NMFS and operated and maintained by the OFIS division of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC). The entire system was moved to Orca by March 15th and the Burroughs B7900 system was powered down and not used after March 21st. The PacFIN system originally developed in 1981, resided on the Burroughs platform from its inception in 1981 until 1995. Although all of the capabilities for processing input data were not implemented by March 21st, all of the existing data was available in Oracle database tables and accessible via sql script routines.

Development of the Quota Species Monitoring (QSM) subsystem, begun in December of 1994, was the first major subsystem completed. The QSM subsystem combines hard data from fish-tickets with weekly reports of estimated catch into a single page report and is used by fishery managers for the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) to monitor the groundfish fishery. This development effort was completed by the end of June and although the hard data derived from fish-tickets was not available during all of 1995, the QSM subsystem was flexible enough such that estimates of cumulative catch were available to PFMC fishery managers each week.

Efforts to implement the Inseason Salmon subsystem were begun in April and although not fully implemented, this portion of the system can accept and store data in Oracle tables.

The transaction processing subsystem, in development since 1994, entered final testing in April and was completed by the end of August. This was the second subsystem to come on-line and restored the ability to process all input data from California, Oregon, and Washington (W-O-C), including validation and storing of data in Oracle tables. With the completion of this portion of the system any information that could be derived from the fish-ticket base for 1981 through 1995 for W-O-C was available to fishery managers, biologists, economists, and other researchers.

While all of this development was going on, the staff of the PacFIN Office was able to squeeze in some additional training for the Orca environment, which augmented the initial training that occurred during 1994. Members of the staff received training in Oracle for End Users; X Window (Vista eXceed); and ″C″ Programming.

Through out the year, a number of presentations and training sessions for PacFIN users were given by the staff. Among those receiving training in how to use the new PacFIN system were: PSMFC personnel in Gladstone; members of the PFMC Groundfish Management Team (GMT); data source (W-O-C) coordinators; and participants attending the PacFIN training session conducted in La Jolla, CA, including staff from the NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) and Southwest Regional Office (SWR) and the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG).

At the August 3rd Technical Meeting, the staff was asked to develop Oracle tables that would contain all of the data currently available for limited-entry-permitted vessels. This project was started in August and was essentially completed by the end of October and involves transfer of data files on a regular basis from the Northwest Regional Office (NWR) of the NMFS.

The last major development of the year centered around the processing of aggregated-catch transactions. This is the transaction used by Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG), the NMFS Alaska Regional Office (AKR), the AFSC, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada (DFO) to input their data to the PacFIN system. Development was started in June, testing commenced in October and this third subsystem was on-line processing input data from ADFG and AKR in the first part of January 1996.

With the close of 1995 the following projects were in various stages of development: the ftl summarize subsystem; the reporting subsystem that will generate the standard PacFIN reports; and the build vessel summaries subsystem. With most of the Oracle/Unix re-development effort completed, the staff was expecting that all PacFIN subsystems would be operational before mid-year.