Standardization at sea: ongoing developm ents fo r EARS event
logging
De Cauwer Karien', Yvan Stojanov1, Jordi Sorribas2, Paolo Diviacco3, Marie-Paule Corre4 and
Alessandro Busato3
1 O perational D irectorate Natural Environm ent, Royal Belgian Institute o f Natural Sciences,
Gulledelle 100, 1200 Brussels, Belgium
E-mail: bmdc@ mumm.ac.be
2 UTM-CSIC, Unidad de Tecnología Marina
Paseo M arítim o de la Barceloneta, 37-49, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
3 OGS, In stitu to Nazionale di Oceanografía e di Geofísica Sperimentale
Borgo G rotta Gigante 4 2 /cn 34010, Trieste, Italy
4 IFREMER, Unité des Navires et Systèmes Embarqués/Service Ingénierie des Logiciels Embarqués
Centre de Brest, BP 70 - 29280 Plouzané, France
W ithin the fram e o f Eurofleets, the developm ent o f com m on softw are tools included the
developm ent o f a reporting tool. EARS, the Eurofleets A u to m a tic Reporting System consists o f an
autom atic data acquisition part, a manual event m odule and reporting fu nctio na litie s. The manual
event m odule aims in the firs t place to have accurately registered m etadata which is o nly possible
when registered as close as possible to the tim e o f m easurem ent or sam pling. Besides com plete
and correct metadata, interoperable inform a tion is o f high im portance fo r fu rth e r use, like
reporting, browsing and dissem ination, over the d iffe re n t cruises and vessels. Existing vocabularies
should be considered as inp ut and vice versa. Especially the SeaDataNet data dictionaries served by
the Natural Environm ent Research Council (NERC) Vocabulary Server are h ighly relevant. By
connecting to these, the standardisation o f m eta-inform ation starts a step sooner: at sea instead o f
at the data centre.
When also looking at the user’s needs, more issues arise. D iffic u lt sam pling conditions and tim e
constraints are im p o rta n t param eters to consider when developing software fo r use on board. User
friendliness is thus o f utm ost im portance: fast entry, m ultilin g ua lism , add itio n o f new term s and
relations, use outside, nested to o ls ... To centralize all meta info rm a tio n in one tool, a clear way fo r
users to enter and retrieve any a dd itional characteristic or param eter accom panying the sample,
observation or m easurem ent according to the specific sam pling or m easurem ent procedure has to
be foreseen.
A th orou g h b rainstorm ing on the characteristics o f an event has resulted in the developm ent o f
event concept. The characteristics and user feedback o f e xisting event loggers like CASINO+ o f
IFREMER and Ours, the Onboard Underway Registration o f Samples, at the O perational Directorate
Natural environm ent have been taken into count. The d iffe re n t com posing concepts as well as the
relations between them have been identified:
■ Subject: the dom ain in which the event takes place, e.g. a seism ic system
■ T o o l: the device th a t produces the event, e.g. a Niskin bottle
■ C ateg ory: the kind o f event ta king place, e.g. sam pling
■ A c tio n : the actual task perform ed, e.g. close bottle
■ C om m en t: a free te x t field th a t is left to the o perator to enter more inform ation
■ A c to r: the person perform ing the action
■ A c tio n _ p ro p e rty : any additional characteristic or param eter accom panying a given action
fo r which the user needs to enter a value onboard e.g. volum e o f w ater centrifuged.
C om m onality between these concepts and e xisting vocabularies has been ide ntifie d. In particular,
the SeaDatanet L05 SeaDataNet device categories can be referred to fo r ‘Subject’, w hile the L22
Seavox device catalogue provides a good list o f m easurem ent devices fo r the ‘T o o l’.
Having events b u ilt over the com bination o f parts, allow high levels o f fle x ib ility but at the same
tim e introduces the risk to get fa r fro m the actual acquisition practices. In o rd e r to avoid errors and
at the same tim e increase user friendliness, it is very im p o rta n t to introduce a mechanism th a t can
constrain choices upon knowledge and e xisting practices. The relations between the instances o f
d iffe re n t concepts are thus im portant.
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A t the start o f Eurofleets 1, ‘A c tio n ’ term s have been defined fo r d iffe re n t to ols and disciplines but
it was obvious th a t all aspects o f all disciplines could not be covered since the start. A fle xib le
approach was chosen to prevent users being blocked during the survey. EARS Version 1 is b u ilt in
such a way th a t relationships between term s are being created by scientific experts creating th e ir
personal and d iscipline-specific co n fig u ra tio n tree. New term s can be easily added. A fte r that, an
event is generated by one d ouble-click or drag-and-drop. In fact, an o ntological instance is being
created during the logging o f inform ation.
The o nto log y im plem entation fo r the event logger w ill enable the reference to e xisting controlled
vocabularies or taxonom ies as well as the usage and sharing o f relations between term s as fo r
exam ple the possible actions w ith a given tool. A leap fo rw a rd is ongoing w ith in Eurofleets 2
th ro ug h the fu ll integ ra tion o f the ontology. The so-far logged events are being gathered in an
extended event o nto lo g y in which term s and relations o f e xisting vocabularies are sourced from
th e ir o rigin atin g namespace. As fo llo w in g step, the user interface to enter manual events w ill be
adapted to be based on RDF files (SKOS, OWL) and SPARQL queries.
In ord er to manage the term s, a governance scheme w ill be im plem ented in close collaboration w ith
SeaDataNet. New term s are to be expected as in p u t fo r the NERC Vocabulary Server catalogues. Any
additional list, relations between term s and com m only used local names w ill be served by a
Eurofleets o ntological server and SPARQL end po in t fo r use w ithin the to o l and fo r browsing linked
event inform ation. Contacts and concrete actions are defined to harmonise and establish a comm on
governance beyond the EU w ith in the ODIP project.
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