The Italian Navy’s Andrea Doria Horizon-Class frigate will be at Maritime Systems and Technology (MAST) 2007 conference and trade show. Tours will be available to pre-registered attendees. I have spoken to some of you who are going, if you get any good photo's or want to generally discuss your observations please let me know, I'm interested to see the Andrea Doria up close.While looking through the conference sessions, I noticed a session called "Maritime Situation Awareness System Based on Open Source Software and Data" by Livingston Davies, Channel Logistics LLC, United States. The description is interesting.
This paper will describe an inexpensive but powerful maritime situation awareness system named CASA, based on World Wind (an open source interactive world viewer software tool developed by the USA’s NASA).
CASA looks and behaves much like Google Earth but has near real-time weather and cloud cover, multi-spectral satellite and low altitude aerial imagery and a map server that will allow user provided imagery to be stitched and automatically integrated minutes after the imagery has been collected.
Imagery can be projected onto 3D Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data to provide accurate and realistic perspective. CASA displays vessel locations and tracks based on AIS, long range tracking, or radar. Using CATE, a companion expert system tool, vessels can be evaluated and selectively displayed using a Boolean filtering of any vessel criteria including proximity, vessel type, flag of registry, ownership, Class Society, etc. The system optionally contains a vessel pre-arrival notification system.
This is the first I had heard of using World Wind for maritime situational awareness, although there are a number of applications that use Google Earth for this. Google Earth based maritime tools and services are popular in the commercial shipping industry, particularly in Europe (not sure about Asia or the US), but for many of the services require a ton of fees and service charges some people can't afford. The other problem is that through licensing agreements with Google, ownership becomes an issue.
What I find interesting about a World Wind model is that it is more likely to be something governments would use because it is open source, thus no dependency on foreign companies or code. I'm thinking a World Wind interface for the "Sea Traffic Control" system discussed earlier this week would be ideal, instead of a commercial product using a proprietary standard that some nations may be skeptical to get into business with.
