Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: VTI

Product

The Vessel Transmitted Information Virtual Research EnvironmentA ''system'' with the following distinguishing features: ''(i)'' it is a Web-based working environment; ''(ii)'' it is tailored to serve the needs of a Community of Practice; ''(iii)'' it is expected to provide a community of practice with the whole array of commodities needed to accomplish the community’s goal(s); ''(iv)'' it is open and flexible with respect to the overall service offering and lifetime; and ''(v)'' it promotes fine-grained controlled sharing of both intermediate and final research results by guaranteeing ownership, provenance, and attribution. (VTI-VREVirtual Research Environment.) is designed to provide full life-cycle management of often confidential electronic messages from vessels. This includes position messages and time-series, capture reports, and electronic log-books. The first use case covers the management of vessel position records, and their aggregation into anonymous effort reports that can be made available on maps or as tabular products. This aggregation removes any vessel-identifiers contained in the data, and classifies effort by computing vessel speed and relating this to bathymetry to infer the type of activity (immobile, steaming, bottom trawling, mid-water trawling).

Priority to CoPCommunity of Practice.

List proposed solution priority following the iMarine Board priority setting criteria:

• The target community is found in Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, national statistical and fishereis institutes, research institutes and international government.
• The users are scientists and other practitioners in need of effort-by-area reports;
• The potential for co-funding is HIGH is a rather thorough use-case has been shown to be supported by an iMarine VREVirtual Research Environment.;
• Structural allocation of resources; WP3 and WP6 can allocate resources for development and testing.
• Referred in DoW; Not directly, but in the context of ICIS, the use-case is justified.
• Business Cases; BC1
• The proposed action supports sustainability aspects in various ways;

1. It helps resource poor organizations to achieve an integrated view over their often large datasets;
2. It helps organizations dealing with confidentiality requirements to securely and safely share summary information with trusted third party representatives;
3. It makes information timely available for policy makers to include in their decision making processes.

• The proposed VREVirtual Research Environment. has met with policy issues because the source data can not leave the data managers infrastructure by agreement.
• The developed solution will be valuable to iMarine since they contribute to: 1. Re-usability of existing and new components, 2. benefits for other VREVirtual Research Environment.'s that can consume richer effort data, and 3. improved compatibility of the the data-products, such as "Effort by area" across data providers. The combination of these three will also result in a rich data-source for more advanced analysis that requires effort information. Effort data can be combined with biodiversity or environmental data to achieve a better understanding of potential impacts of fisheries.

Parentage

Relation to CoPCommunity of Practice. Software

No immediate CoPCommunity of Practice. software tools were used or replaced.

Relation to D4S technologies

1. VTI can be considered a logical extension of ICIS for the data management part;
2. The GeoExplorer is instrumental in vizualizing the results on maps, and to materialize results;
3. The Statistical Server is used to perform the aggregation of vessel tracks over space, bathymetry and period.

Productivity

Are the proposed measures effective? To be decided

Does it reduce a known workload? To be decided

Presentation

How must the component be delivered to users? (UI Design / on-line help / training material / support)

Most UI components rely on iMarine components that are re-purposed, with the exception of the computational part. Also for on-line help, and support the VREVirtual Research Environment. can benefit from existing resources.

Policy

Are there any policies available that describe data access and sharing?

Yes, most fisheries organizations have restrictive data policies. In most cases, these prevent them from moving data beyond their infrastructure boundary, greatly complicating the implementation of effective VREVirtual Research Environment.'s.

Have the Copyright / attribution / metadata / legal aspects been addressed from a user and technology perspective?

These have been addressed from the user perspective, and these are captured in the data access and sharing policies. From the technology perspective, not all requirements have been met as per September 2013.