In order to improve the availability of the Belgian marine data LifeWatch, VLIZ recently started a pilot "LifeWatch data cloud" on the VSC Supercomputing-as-a-service platform.
A recent survey among members of The Blue Cluster showed that Flemish maritime companies are in need of easy access to the raw, validated and processed long-term data series for the Belgian part of the North Sea, such as those generated by LifeWatch. These companies noted that it would be useful for them to easily process and fuse or combine datasets, particularly during the research and development phase of new products and services.
That is where the "Data Cloud for Maritime Industry" project comes into play. Currently, already a lot of data is being produced (physico-chemical, biodiversity, hydrometeo, acoustic, etc.) by public and private initiatives. With 5G and rapidly evolving real-time (bio-)sensors on the horizon, this will certainly lead to an even increasing amount of data and new applications at VLIZ, going hand in hand with an increase in the need of computing power and Big Data solutions.
This new tool will make that data easily available to marine researchers and professionals. It will include a gallery of pre-made products (e.g. distribution and habitat suitability maps for seaweed species) and a data explorer where users can upload external data sources and their own datasets via a straightforward and user-friendly interface on the VSC Tier-1 SaaS infrastructure, thereby also enabling users to process this data via complex computations. The platform is scheduled to be launched later this year.
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