EU-OSHA – Dashboarding Framework

For many years, Zylk.net and Bilbomática have worked together in order to provide custom developments and maintenance services for the EU-OSHA European Agency.

In conjunction, we are building a stack of software products, that the Agency can reuse in order to minimize the costs of future projects, providing them ad-hoc features suitable for European Agencies, such as internationalization, localization, open-data availability, accessibility, SEO and many more.

Being able to deliver fast dashboards, in order to provide a quick and meaningful message, was one of the requirements for 2016 and that is the aim of the Data Visualization Tool Framework (DVT).

The Framework must look after the different phase requirements, which include data extraction, transformation and load (ETL tasks), development, taking advantage of all the features that the framework provides, and an user-friendly delivery in form of dashboards that enable the user to follow the conclusions of the Agency’s reports related to the Safety and Health at Work issues.

Because open source software has already consolidated its benefits, the Agency stakes for Pentaho as the BI tool that will perform these dashboards, thanks to the Community Dashboarding Tools, or Ctools.

“CTools is a set of tools and components created to help you build Custom Dashboards on top of Pentaho”.

These tools, not only allow us to deliver beautiful information, but they are perfectly rendered on both traditional desktop and mobile or tablet devices.

The documentation is extensive and high quality, making the learning process easier for new developers.

After the initial phases, which included the tool selection, prototypes and the first dashboard development, the Agency is already working on more dashboards. Producing dashboards will also serve as medium and bias that will enable the framework to become more and more mature, for the future dashboards benefit.

From Zylk.net we will accompany the Agency in order to integrate these requirements in the most profitable way, allowing future dashboards' previous features to be available out of the box, as well as getting the most out of the products' new features as the product evolves.