NEPTUNE Canada Information

NEPTUNE Canada enables research in computer science. NEPTUNE Canada is primarily an oceanographic observatory meant to collect information from the sea floor and the water column in a 24/7 mode. While NEPTUNE Canada represents a first for ocean sciences, one can argue that 24/7 data collection is not so new for computer sciences: other scientific disciplines have had data acquisition and archiving software in place for a long time in support their operation. What is new with NEPTUNE Canada however, is our ability to adopt the newest technologies in terms of software architecture. NEPTUNE Canada represents an extension of the Internet under the ocean and therefore is well suited for the applications of modern service and resource integration concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture or Web 2.0 in a cyber-infrastructure. Moreover, the sheer volume of data that will come from hundreds of sensors observing their environment continuously is simply to large for humans to deal with. The other aspects of IT research that can be advanced through NEPTUNE Canada involves automatic feature detection or on-the-fly data mining in continuous streams. Particularly challenging is the data flow from passive acoustic receivers such as hydrophones which mostly record noise with an rare occasional interesting feature. Challenging are also the video streams.