Introduction

OGC provides a family of standards specifications called ‘Sensor Web Enablement’ (SWE) which includes detailed information about the sensors making measurements and the platforms that carry the sensors using the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), general models and XML encodings for sensor Observations and Measurements (O&M), and a protocol to provide access to observations from sensors and sensor systems in a standard way (Sensor Observation Service (SOS)).

Various projects in Europe, USA and Australia are making progress with adopting Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and developing SWE standards. These can be applied by operators of operational marine observation systems to describe in more detail their observations and to provide standardised access to these observations using the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) protocol. This can provide a way for direct access to the related data streams from operational sensor systems, such as real-time ocean monitoring networks and underway data from systems on board research vessels.

Partners from several EU funded projects and initiatives in Europe (such as Eurofleets2, SeaDataNet II, BRIDGES, FixO3, JericoNext, NeXOS, SenseOcean, Schema, ODIP II), USA (IOOS, X-DOMES), and Australia (AODN) have teamed up to avoid interoperability issues and to tune the development of marine profiles of OGC SWE standards that can serve as a common basis for developments in multiple projects and organisations.

The SWE Workshop at Oceanology International 2016 (OI2016) has been an initiative of the Eurofleets2 project to give an overview of the present state of developments and a panel discussion. Partners in the mentioned projects, developers of monitoring systems, and manufacturers of instruments and platforms have been invited for sharing their views on adoption of SWE standards.

Aims of the Workshop:

• dissemination and creating awareness at a larger audience of what we are doing and what it might bring them
• identify industry contacts to start a further dialogue, followed by possible collaboration and implementation opportunities.

Attendees:
the Workshop has been open for everybody who were invited by personal mailing, promotion at the Eurofleets website and the OI2016 website, and by distributing invitation leaflets at OI2016 stands. The Workshop has brought together circa 60 persons. Target persons were developers and managers of operational oceanography observing systems on board of vessels and on networks of observation platforms; manufacturers of observation instruments and manufacturers of observation platforms; marine and ocean data managers. In effect, most participants belonged to the first group while only a few industry representatives joined.