Users

The main objective of RAPID-N is to facilitate natech risk assessment and mapping, and enhance information sharing on natechs by providing a collaborative, open-access environment. For this purpose, the system is developed to support multiple users.

The information available in the system, except for private natech risk assessment records, are open to everyone through the Internet. Registered users can contribute to the system by supplying plant, plant unit, hazard, natech, or natech damage data and benefit from the system for natech risk as-sessment and mapping purposes. Registration to the system is free and can be done from the registra-tion page accessible from the login page by providing basic personal information. Information on users are stored in user records. User records also include basic system usage statistics and user preferences besides personal information. The data fields of the user records are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. User data fields

There are two types of users with different user privileges: users and administrators. Users have data entry and modification rights; hence, they can contribute to the contents of the system. They can per-form public or private natech risk assessments. Following the basic principle of open-content systems, many record types are allowed to be created by the users. However, to maintain the record integrity, if not explicitly stated otherwise, records can only be modified or deleted by the users who created them, i.e. the owners. The administrators can restrict modification rights of an owner by locking the record. Users can freely comment on records that are created by other users.

Administrators are responsible for the management of the system and have complete control over the system components. They can create, update or delete records regardless of record specific user privi-leges and locking mechanism applied by the system. There are also certain record types that can be ac-cessed (e.g. contents, messages, logs) and tasks that can be performed (e.g. user management, alias management) only by the administrators, which are explained in the following sections.

In order to register to the system, name, e-mail and password should be provided. The e-mail address is used for user login. Only one user account is allowed for a single e-mail address. Administrators are al-lowed to delete users. However, due to the record history (logging) mechanism of the system (see "Logs" section), users who created or modified a record cannot be deleted. Such users can be prevented from logging on to the system by setting their status to suspended. The status of newly registered users and users who modified their e-mail address is set to pending until they validate their e-mail address by approving the notification e-mail sent by the system. Pending users can also temporarily not log on to the system.

Users are allowed to customize selected system settings. Currently, this feature is limited to date and coordinate formats, which determine how such data items are displayed on the data entry and view pages. Three different date formats are supported. The selected date format is binding for data entry, i.e. user-entered data should conform to the format. Similar to the date formats, three different coordi-nate formats are supported. However, the system supports all coordinate formats simultaneously for data entry, determines the format used by the user, and standardizes the coordinate automatically. For more details on date and coordinate data items see the "Form Elements" section.

The system collects basic system usage data for each user. The collected information includes registra-tion date, date of the last login, total number of logins and total number of page views. This information is only used to calculate the user activity. A summary of the record-related actions performed by the user is also provided for the administrators by using information available in log records. The summary includes number of created, updated, and deleted records listed by record type (Figure 1).