Engineering and computation research
NEPTUNE Canada enables research in computer science.
NEPTUNE is primarily an oceanographic observatory meant to collect information from the sea floor and the water column in a 24/7 mode. While NEPTUNE represents a first for ocean sciences, one can argue that 24/7 data collection is not so new for computer sciences: other scientific disciplines have had data acquisition and archiving software in place for a long time in support their operation. What is new with NEPTUNE however, is our ability to adopt the newest technologies in terms of software architecture. NEPTUNE represents an extension of the Internet under the ocean and therefore is well suited for the applications of modern service and resource integration concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture or Web 2.0 in a cyber-infrastructure. Moreover, the sheer volume of data that will come from hundreds of sensors observing their environment continuously is simply to large for humans to deal with. The other aspects of IT research that can be advanced through NEPTUNE involves automatic feature detection or on-the-fly data mining in continuous streams. Particularly challenging is the data flow from passive acoustic receivers such as hydrophones which mostly record noise with an rare occasional interesting feature. Challenging are also the video streams. Reaction to events is also an area where the benefits of a Service Oriented Architecture and the use of publish and subscribe technologies will be really useful: an event detected in one of the data streams (e.g., an earthquake detected by a seismometer) will trigger a response involving commanding other instruments to change their basic routine as well as warning scientists over cell-phone
messages.
In summary, the research areas now covered by DMAS include the following:
- With the help of CANARIE Inc. we are now in a position to implement a Service Oriented software architecture for the NEPTUNE Canada Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS).
- With the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), we are exploring our ability to detect (and later classify) features detected in underwater video streams. This is done through adaptation of MBARI's AVED software.
- Thanks to Uvic's Dr. Tzanetakis' Marsyas software, we are in a position to detect features in hydrophone data streams.
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