User documentation

  • Introductory videos are available on the videos page.
  • Tutorials and reference manuals.
    Note that when Tethys is installed, these tutorials and reference manuals can be accessed from the Web Client which is accessible from the web client. For example, if your server is at http://your.server.gov:9779/Client, you can access documentation from the Tethys pull-down menu at the top right of the display. Update the web address appropriately for your server name as well as the port number if it has been changed from the default 9779 port. Use https:// if you are running the Tethys server with encryption enabled.
    In addition to documentation for end users, there is documentation for data managers and developers, providing details on issues such as how to set up an encrypted server over secure socket layer, transforming your data to Tethys ready data via a mapping interface or the Nilus application programming interface, and how to bypass the client libraries and access Tethys directly using a RESTful interface.

Understanding how we represent data

  • Roch et al. (2016), Management of acoustic metadata for bioacoustics lays out many of the guiding principles of the data that we retain.
  • The S3/SC1.7-202 Acoustical Society of America / American National Standards Institute standard was motivated by the needs of the bioacoustic community. Early work on standardizing passive acoustic metadata rose from a 2011 joint ONR/BOEM project of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program to construct a scientific workbench for passive acoustic monitoring (San Diego State University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and many of the US NOAA National Marine Fisheries Science Centers with participation from the US National Parks Service). As that work matured, a standards committee was formed and additional functionality was added, culminating in the S3/SC1.7-202 standard funded by the US Navy Living Marine Resources program that was published in 2026. Versions of Tethys 3.2 or later are a nearly complete implementation of the standard, differing in a few minor areas (e.g., we do not support multiple sets of effort times within a set of detections or localizations that are associated with a deployment). See the standards page for additional information about the standard including an open access how-to document that is designed to help practitioners understand how the standard can be used.

Tethys XML schemata are used as a concrete implementation of our data ontology. It is assumed that serious users of the database will spend sometime becoming familar with the Tethys data model. In addition to the aforementioned how-to document, the Tethys user manual in on the tutorials and reference manuals page provides descriptions of the data model.

Tethys stores data in a native XML database. In general, users of Tethys do not need to learn languages to query XML databases, and the client programs extract most of the details away from the user.

For people who with a deeper understanding of XQuery, XPath, and XML Schemata, we suggest consulting the following texts:

  • for XML Schema: Walmsley, P. (2002). Definitive XML Schema. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.
  • for XQuery and XPath: Walmsley, P. (2006). XQuery. Farnham, UK: O’Reilly

Schema are stored in the database directories: database-name/lib/schema/*.xsd and are best viewed with a schema viewer such as OxygenXML. A less interactive version of the schemata can be viewed here.