The International Economic Data Bank is an initiative of the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University and is a collaborative project between the school and the Australian National University Supercomputer Facility (ANUSF). The project provides access to a database of international trade data that has been collected since 1965.

Up until Agileware's part of the project commenced, this data has only been accessible by an entirely manual process consisting of:

1. A request being made to the school for data with given conditions
2. A database administrator running the query directly on the system
3. Collection of results by the stakeholder, either in digital or print form

Agileware's involvement in the project was to provide a front end application to allow stakeholders to query this database and obtain results. Some of the key objectives that the client wanted to achieve included:

• Easy to navigate interface for querying many of the databases this project contains
• Ability to access past queries (query history)
• Results formatted in Excel compatible format
• Integration with Google Charts for charting of results
• Usage statistics to get a feel for who is using the system
• Theme to fit with the ANU style guide
• On-line help, editing and maintained by ANU staff

Due to the complexity of the query interface, Agileware's developers set about creating an architecture which allowed both databases and query filters to be extended, maintained and integrated into the Drupal CMS. Agileware effectively built an application on top of Drupal, leveraging the powerful Drupal application programming interface (API) to reduce development time and costs, provide functionality already contributed by the fantastic Drupal community and achieve the clients objectives.

The International Economic Data Bank website is hosted on the ANUSF, required to manage the 140GB+ of data in 7 MySQL databases.

The result is a website which reduces management overhead and provides students better access to the resources they require.

The International Economic Data Bank website is available at http://iedb.anu.edu.au