Overview of the SoDa Service

The SoDa Service is a broker to a list of services and webservices, i.e. it offers a one-stop access to a large set of information relating to solar radiation and its use. This service itself is not a warehouse. The innovation is that it is made of an Intelligent System (SoDa IS) that builds links to other resources that are located in various countries. To answer a request, the SoDa service invokes several resources to elaborate the appropriate answer and ensures the flow and exchange of information between the services and itself, as well as with the customer.

Please, find here more information on how to use SoDa.

SoDa has been developed by the Centre Energétique et Procédés (CEP). This is a common laboratory of the school of Engineers Mines ParisTech and ARMINES. ARMINES, a structure created in 1967, is based on the concept of research-orientated towards the industry. With more than 600 employees at ARMINES (teaching scientists, research engineers, doctoral candidates, postgraduates, technicians, administrative personnel), they support research together with their colleagues from the schools in joint research centres from ARMINES/ Schools.

TRANSVALOR S.A. has been created by ARMINES in 1984 to transfer and valorize toward infustry the results of the research centers managed by ARMINES. It was mainly involved in the developement and commercialization of a tool for material forming simulation named FORGE. Since the first months of the year 2009, a new department has been created: TRANSVALOR Innovation. It is in charge of the commercialization and exploitation of SoDa, and of a few other innovative research projects. This introduction of new manpower (womanpower as well :o) ) offer the opportunity for our Customers to have a large panel of new high-skill service delivery, such as: a service of map creation, the calibration of long term HelioClim time series using short term ground station measurements, the setting up of automatic requests to the HelioClim data for monitoring applications... Read more about Transvalor S.A. and about the team.

The catalogue of services is displayed when clicking on "Services" on the above menu. From this catalogue, a service can be launched. A service can also be accessed by the item "Access a Service" on menu on the left.

The SoDa Service answers the needs of industry and research for information on solar resource, solar energy and solar radiation data and its exploitation. Examples are renewable energy systems (photovoltaics, solar thermal for water heating, solar plants, solar heating and cooling), energy efficiency in building or solar energy system, architecture, daylighting in building, environment, meteorology, climatology, global change, health, air quality and pollution, ocean, water (reservoir, eutrophication), primary production, vegetation, agriculture, forestry, horticulture, material weathering... Click here to get examples of usage and testimonies in each of these domains.

A service, or resource, can be a database (e.g., solar radiation database or temperature database), or an algorithm that performs on data to create a new information, or an application that provides an information that can be directly used by professionals. Click here to access the list of services per application fields.

Right illustration: this poster offers a brief presentation about SoDa and about the applications of the HelioClim databases. This is a contribution to the state-of-the-art workshop COST ES1002 WIRE (Weather Intelligence for Renewable Energies), March 22-24^th 2011.