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It is indispensable to have time synchronization and event/pulse generation systems on board oceanographic research vessels to control the data acquisition rate of sensors and equipment. This paper presents a pulse generation system based on the aJ-100 real-time Java embedded system with the capability of being integrated into a general-purpose acquisition system of the BIO Hesperides research vessel named LabVir. In the development of this system, a platform with reduced size and weight and networking technology for system control and data access was used, making its integration easy in any research vessel. Furthermore, a logic design for the event generation was implemented, making the overall system adaptable to any future needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A meteorological data distribution system (MDDS) is presented. The system was implemented in the Spanish Juan Carlos I Antarctic station during the 2002–2003 campaign. Mete- orological data are distributed to any point of the base using the LAN, which allows distributing data up to a 3.3-km radius from the acquisition point. The acquisition control procedures are also integrated in the same system. A wide range of difficulties have been overcome during the development of the MDDS, including the integration of heterogeneous components, the integrity of the message system, the future extension and scalability of the system, fault tolerance, process concurrency, and the temporary synchronization of all the applications involved. These have been achieved through three steps, namely 1) design of a complete object-oriented model of the system; 2) implementation of this model using a scalable and portable development environment, such as Java; and 3) use of an intercommunication application technology that fits all the system requirements (high level of abstraction and easy to program and to deploy) as the remote method invocation technology from Java. This development is part of a more ambitious project, called LabVir, that is devoted to implement distributed measurements in Spanish oceanographic vessels and in the Antarctic base using Web technology interfaces. In a more general framework, the LabVir project will make the experimentation tools accessible from any existing navigator, creating a distributed research environment, that is accessible and user friendly from any place with hypertext transfer protocol connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To use data proficiently and efficiently, scientists require comprehensive metadata. This is very difficult to reconstruct conceptually, positionally and temporally far from the time and place of data acquisition. The European Commission funded Eurofleets project, whose mission is to build an integrated European oceanographic research vessel fleet, is developing a system that aims to address this issue by capturing metadata in a uniform way at time of observation. As this is a European-wide initiative, the problems associated with the desired level of integration are also broad. Having so many partners, different paradigms, schools, practices and vocabularies must be taken into consideration. Assuming that this divergence is natural and even somehow positive in the perspective of adapting to a changing environment, we detail how bridging can take place using a systemic approach. In the Eurofleets experience, this relied on the definition of a boundary object: that is an artifact that can be used by each of the diverging communities, since it embeds the core, shared conceptual entities. The structure of the boundary object is based on an event model, its ontology and the controlled vocabularies linked to it. All conceptual entities, and indeed the structure of the boundary object itself, resulted from wide discussions among the divergent communities. These discussions, allowed the extension of meaning from a semantic perspective to the pragmatic scope, where theoretical and cultural matters can also be considered, so that, eventually, the knowledge represented by the boundary object is more likely to be understood across the divergent communities. To exploit the possibilities offered by the boundary object, specific software has been developed that, using the event model and ontology, allows easier deployment across the project partners of a system intended to address the heterogeneity of the research vessel fleet. In this paper we describe in detail the underlying ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the development of Eurofleets Automatic Reporting System (EARS), an event log software, by European Union (EU) FP7 Projects Eurofleets and Eurofleets2, a European wide group of marine research center. Topics mentioned include the importance of EARS in data quality management, the management of completeness and accuracy of metadata, and the objectives of the European Fleet organization to improve information sharing.