SIMOcean (System for Integrated Monitoring of the Ocean), co-funded by the EEA Grants Programme, is integrated in the initiative of the Portuguese Government to develop a set of coordinated systems providing access to national marine data. These systems aim to improve the Portuguese marine management, monitoring and vigilance capabilities, by aggregating different observational, satellite and model ocean and other related (e.g. meteorological, atmospheric) datasets related to marine environment monitoring, associated human activities, and their social, environmental and economic impact. Those datasets, currently scattered among different departments of the Portuguese Meteorological (IPMA) and the Navy’s Hydrographic (IH) Institutes, will be brought together in the SIMOcean Open Data system.
The SIMOcean exploits these datasets through the following flagship value-added services: 1) Characterisation of Fishing Areas; 2) Wave Alerts for Sea Ports; and 3) Diagnostic of Meteo-Oceanographic Fields. The development of these services was driven by end users such as Civil Protection Authorities, Port Authorities and Fishing Associations, where these new products lead to a significant positive impact in their operations.
SIMOcean is based on open source interoperable solutions, compliant with OGC standards and INSPIRE directive, to support the evolution of a set of open interfaces and protocols in the development of a common European Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The Catalogue solution (based on CKAN) considers the Portuguese Metadata Profile for the Sea developed by SNIM@R project, the guidelines provided by the directive 2013/37/EU and the Goldbook from the European Data portal. The processing engine is based on the SenSyF approach, a scalable Cloud Computing infrastructure, providing to authorised entities a single access point system for data catalogue, visualisation, processing and deployment of value-added services.