Scientific Web sites and Applications Team blog
Everything you need to know about scientific web development at OD Nature...

2015April30

The HNS-MS project: towards a decision support tool for accidents at sea involving Harmful Noxious Substances

Today, we're releasing the web site for the HNS-MS project.

This project is funded by the European Commission's Humanitarian aid and Civil Protection department (DG-ECHO) and is coordinated by RBINS / OD Nature.

The aim is to develop a decision-support tool that national maritime authorities and coastguard stations will activate in order to forecast the drift, fate and behaviour of acute marine pollution by Harmful Noxious Substances (HNS) accidentally released in the marine system. At the end of the project (December 2016) we will deliver a demonstrator web-based decision-support tool that will help coastguard stations to evaluate the risks for maritime safety, civil protection and marine environment in case of an acute pollution of the sea.

SWAP is responsible for integrating the contributions of the consortium partners into a usable, intuitive application. Users will be able to make complex 3D simulations and to access and use a database containing the physico-chemical parameters needed to compute the behaviour in the marine environment of 100+ relevant HNS and to visualise simulations results. Access to sensitivity maps (geographical layers) will also be provided.

The post The HNS-MS project: towards a decision support tool for accidents at sea involving Harmful Noxious Substances was last updated on 30 April 2015
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2015April17

The AquaRES web site has been released

AquaRES (Aquatic Species Register Exchange and Services) is a Belspo funded BRAIN project in which VLIZ, ULB and RBINS collaborate to set up the exchange between the species registers WoRMS, RAMS and FADA. This project provides an opportunity to improve the data entry tools for taxonomic experts, in order to facilitate the processing of their data and the entry of species distribution information.

The post The AquaRES web site has been released was last updated on 17 April 2015
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2015March17

A new version of our ODAS web application is available

We're announcing today that our ODAS web application is available after a complete redesign.

As we've mentioned in a previous blog post, the communication means between the RV Belgica and our servers in Ostend and Brussels have been recently upgraded and we're now getting updates from the ship in near-real time.

So, what's ODAS exactly?

ODAS stands for Onboard Data Aquisition System. The system is composed of an array of sensors onboard of the RV Belgica which monitor constantly several parameters in the water and the weather. These measurements are collected and transmitted to the OD Nature Measurement Services Ostend (MSO) via a satellite link about every 10 minutes, where they are saved in the ODAS database combined with information about the position, heading and speed of the RV Belgica at the time of each measurement.

A visualisation tool existed on the mumm.ac.be web site for many years. It served us well and was upgraded a few times during its lifetime. But with better and more frequent communication from the ship came the time to overhaul the system in terms of coding, interface, data access and storage.

The most significant changes are in the way data is received and stored, and in how the web application is constructed. In terms of user interface, ship tracks data are presented per campaign. There is a fully searchable index, so looking for a specific campaign ID, date, harbour or theme is very easy and fast. On the map, information about point measurements are available at an interval of an hour approximatively. A table displays available measurements every 10 minutes, despite the possible availability of higher resolution data stored in our databases.

Please note that the ODAS data has not been subjected to human quality control and is for informational purposes only.

Extra features

The RV Belgica home page now displays information about the ship's last received position together with a few of the parameters measured by ODAS (e.g.ship heading and speed, wind speed and direction, water depth and temperature). A webcam has been installed on the bridge and transmits a new image every two minutes.

The RV Belgica web site is available in English, français and Nederlands

The post A new version of our ODAS web application is available was last updated on 17 March 2015
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