PacFIN Brief for 1998

[Complete 1998 PSMFC Annual Report (233 KB pdf)]

The two main development efforts during 1998 were development of the Washington, Oregon, California (W-O-C) centralized trawl logbook data tables and development of the W-O-C centralized biological data tables. In addition to these two main efforts, smaller software development and enhancement, database expansion and improvement, and hardware procurement projects were completed.

During 1998, the PacfIN Office processed 167 datafeeds from eight data sources and responded to 166 requests-for-information. There were also 34,268 visits to PSMFC's PacFIN web site for an average of 2,855 visits per month.

In January two computer programmers were hired, after recruitment efforts during December.

A project was conducted to review the processing of 2-digit year and 4-digit year data input items. A few inconsistencies were found and these were rectified. Note: all columns in the PacFIN database that store a year use a 4-digit year.

The Quota Species Monitoring (QSM) subsystem was expanded to include data entry via a comma-delimited text file in addition to the existing interactive dialogue method.

The State-vessel (SV) table and the SV input transaction specification were enhanced to include vessel owner's name and address and a column to indicate whether the vessel is a charter boat. Data for vessel owner name and address and charter boat indicator were input by CDFG for 1982 thru 1998 and are now part of the SV table.

The project to centralize the Washington, Oregon, and California (W-O-C) trawl logbook data within the central database was started in January and by December it was nearing completion.

The project to centralize the W-O-C biological data within the central database was completed during this year as well. This biological consists of port sampling and fish ageing data and includes: weight, length, sex, maturity, and age of each fish.

Support for the NMFS/NWR's Sablefish Endorsement/3-tier project occured during January and May. This support included software development/modifications and data retrievals.

A few data quality issues were addressed during the year including: developing an algorithm to produce corrected gear codes, while retaining the original gear code; developing lists of suspect vessel identifiers for review by each data source; and additional validation of dates input by data sources.

Additional reports were added to the PSMFC/PacFIN website, a few existing website reports were modified, and a subpage for exclusive use by data source agencies was established.

At the request of our CDFG data source all species codes for all CDFG fish-ticket entries for all 18 years were translated from their internal to external set of species codes.

The data table containing information about each W-O-C county was re-worked so that it now relates to individual state port codes, which allows for more complete accumulations by county.

The four desk-top systems running Windows 3.1 were replaced by new Gateway 2000 systems running the NT operating system.