It is an ultimate goal to establish a common system for giving e-access to underway and operational information and data from sailing research vessels. This is foreseen as:
- a generic RV boardsystem, to be installed and configured at research vessels, capable of recording any possible event, ranging from a sample taken or an observation done to any malfunction occurring;
- an en-route Cruise Summary Reporting (CSR) system integrated into the RV boardsystem of which the output can be made available on the EuroFleets EVIOR portal, giving the cruise track and position of each RV, outfitted with the system, while sailing, an overview of events, and a first level inventory of oceanographic measurements made and samples taken during the cruises;
- a linkage between the shipboard metadata and data systems to the EVIOR portal for giving users opportunities for direct access to operational data for selected situations.
As part of the previous Eurofleets project a first step has been undertaken in analysing and exploring the options:
- the EARS - Eurofleets Automatic Reporting System was developed and tested in practice. It is capable of recording any possible event, ranging from a sample taken or an observation done to any malfunction occurring. The installation on a number of research vessels has provided useful insights for adapting extra functionality and making EARS more robust and fit for various RV configurations which upgrading will be undertaken in the EuroFleets+ project. This will include a routine for producing en-route Cruise Summary Reports based on the EARS logged event information, by combining cruise data, events data and automatically acquired data. so far a prototype system has been set-up for the RVs Hesperides and Sarmiento de Gamboa (both from Spain) for on-line reporting of the geographic position, speed, bearing and logged events for the onboard fixed instruments from the RVs to the CSIC data centre. The underway instruments are described as SensorML files.
The latter is demonstrated as a Prototype Dynamic Vessel Tracking & Events System on the EVIOR portal by means of a User Interface to retrieve:
- dynamic charts of the momentary position of the RVs with position, speed, and bearing
- track-charts of the RVs sailing from start of the prototype service till present with overview of the sailed tracks, details of positions, speeds and bearings, and option to re-run the tracks as animations
- 24 hour Ship Summary Reports (SSR) by clicking on any position of the vessel track; the SSR includes options to retrieve the event logs for the fixed instruments.
These e-access system developments are continued as part of the EuroFleets+successor project.