sniff

Development environment for Brighter Planet "emitter" libraries.

Brighter Planet's impact models, such as flight, inhabit a complex production runtime environment backing the CM1 web service. Sniff simulates this environment, including representative data, fixtures, and other supporting code, so that developers can test improvements to the emitters before submitting them back to Brighter Planet.

The data and other supporting information in the sniff environment is only representative of production data and in many cases is purely fictional, contrived to return predictable results in tests. Emission estimates and other information gleaned from execution within this environment will undoubtedly be--to put it simply--wrong. For real numbers, always use live queries to CM1.

Sniff is never used directly but rather as a requirement of a specific emitter. Current production emitters include, for example:

• Automobile
• Flight
• Residence

For a complete list see CM1's models page.

Sniff comes with a rake task that will load a console with a given earth domain:

require 'sniff'
require 'sniff/rake_task'
Sniff::RakeTask.new do |t|
  t.earth_domains = [:air, :locality]
end

At the command prompt, do:

> rake console
irb > ZipCode.first
#=> <ZipCode id="...>

An emitter is a software model of a real-world impact source, like a flight. Brighter Planet's emitter libraries each comprise an impact model, an attribute curation policy, a persistence schema, and a summarization strategy.

Although the production environment does not persist emitter instances, we nevertheless define emitter schemas to ease ActiveRecord assocations. An emitter's schema is defined in lib/*emitter_name*/data.rb within an emitter library. For example, here is flight's schema.

Schema are defined using a DSL provided by the data_miner library.

This defines how an emitter's attributes (initialized and stored with respect to the schema) are curated and decorated into a snapshot for later use by the impact model. The policy is defined in lib/*emitter_name*/characterization.rb within an emitter library. For example, here is flight's characterization.

Characterizations are defined using a DSL provided by the characterizable library.

An impact estimate is obtained by giving an emitter's curated characteristics as input to an execution of its impact model. The model is defined in lib/*emitter_name*/characterization.rb within an emitter library. For example, here is flight's impact model.

Carbon models are defined using a DSL provided by the leap library.

Summaries are human-friendly descriptions of characterized emitters. The strategy is defined in lib/*emitter_name*/summarization.rb within an emitter library. For example, here is flight's summarization strategy.

Summarizations are defined using a DSL provided by the summary_judgement library.

Brighter Planet vigorously encourages collaborative improvement of its emitter libraries. Collaboration requires a (free) GitHub account.

1. Fork the emitter repository on GitHub.
2. Write a test proving the existing implementation's inadequacy. Ensure that the test fails. Commit the test.
3. Improve the code until your new test passes and commit your changes.
4. Push your changes to your GitHub fork.
5. Submit a pull request to brighterplanet.

1. Receive a pull request.
2. Pull changes from forked repository.
3. Ensure tests pass.
4. Review changes for scientific accuracy.
5. Merge changes to master repository and publish.
6. Direct production environment to use new emitter version.