Mike Osborne, SeaZone Managing Director on the past, present and future of marine data.

Well first of all I’d like to add my congratulations to Digimap. It’s certainly an honour to be here and I think we’ll recognize that marine Digimap is one of the youngest of the Digimap services- and that’s actually been going for two years, how time flies, it doesn’t seem like two years but hopefully a whole new world is being opened up to users.

Well I’m not quite sure what happened to my brief, I wasn’t sure how long I’ve got. I’ve got quite a few slides – I’m going to have to rattle through them very quickly, but I do want to dwell on a couple. And really you can say that all of what the three speakers before me have said really applies, and can also apply for the marine side. But we do have a number of challenges if you like, and the first one is that really for the last 3,000 years, only up until very recently in the last few decades, the focus on collecting data at sea has been navigation, navigation, navigation. And really it wasn’t until the 1890s with the voyage of the challenger which has opened up the whole field of oceanography, offshore oil and gas, and offshore renewables, that there have much more wider use of data. So I think the focus really, one of the things I’d like you to take away from this is I guess most of you are using Marine Digimap for non navigation purposes, and indeed that’s what it’s for. If you’re navigating, then use a navigational product – and there are some very good ones around – not necessarily the Polynesian stick chart that you can see there, but hopefully a more modern equivalent.

The problem we’ve had is because we haven’t had somebody in DEFRA said to me ‘Don’t we need an Ordnance Survey of the sea?’ – now I’m not quite sure what your reaction might be to that, but we haven’t had one – we’ve had a Hydrographic Office, and its focus has been as I said navigation, navigation, navigation. So what’s happened? We have a whole plethora of organisations going out and collecting data and I think you saw one of the issues earlier with Hugh – with his boat collecting hydrographic data. Some of you were thinking – ‘well that’s fine, but why isn’t the Hydrographic Office doing that? Why is British geological survey doing that?’ So I think one the biggest challenges that certainly I’ve faced over the last 10 years or so with SeaZone is identifying this as an issue and then working with British geological survey for example and the Channel Coastal Observatory, oil and gas companies, and say ‘Look, we are all in this together, we should be pooling our resources, and we should be trying to save money through smarter working rather than less working’.

And if you think about all those applications, all of them actually require comprehensive fit for purpose data information. So really the vision is to unlock all of that information that the Hydrographic Office over the years has effectively archived or ignored. And we started this process in 1995. The mission then was to create an accurate, comprehensive digital marine map, and a lot of the source data that the Hydrographic Office uses doesn’t actually belong to the Hydrographic Office. So they get for example sea bed information from geological survey or from other surveys, the position and navigation buoys comes from trinity house and the lighthouse boards – or it may come from a port authority. So they are collating information from responsible authorities let’s call them. And I think this is one of the things that will perhaps hopefully will come out of the UK location programme, actually identifying responsible authorities and make them react in a certain way that they realize they’re responsible for certain data themes, and they start managing and publishing that data in a way that’s a lot more useful to all of us and not just to meet their own individual requirements.

So, I don’t want to dwell on what charting is all about. It’s basically a conservative safety biased view of the world and some of the things that I’d like to see on the new platform I will be talking to the guys at EDINA about. We shouldn’t be showing land information for example on Marine Digimap, it should be integrated. The whole issue of interoperability – if we can overcome any licensing issues I think it’s certainly the future and certainly where a lot of effort I believe should be focused. And so the challenge really is going from source to product. The problem we’ve got is actually because of the history of the way charts were created, many of the feature types actually only exist on the paper chart, and the electronic chart is a digital copy of the paper chart. So you’ve got all sorts of issues with discontinuities between charts, features being shown on one chart and not on another chart – and we’re slowly working through that process.

Don’t want to say too much about HydroSpatial because you can look on Digimap and have a look at that. Don’t want to say about SDI components particularly, only to say that I support, and just state that it can be equally applied to the marine domain to actually have interlinking reference application and also business information within that data infrastructure.

So what is marine reference information? Well I do a lot of work with the marine environmental data and information network and we’re identifying reference information, of course we’ve got the INSPIRE themes to look at as well. And these are the data sets that we’re focusing on within SeaZone to create that comprehensive reference information for our seas.

So what is the future of marine geo? Well first of all we’ve got to get to grips with the politics and we need a marine data policy – the government needs a marine data policy and there isn’t one. We need organizational objectives, which I was mentioning earlier with regard to responsible authority so that we don’t continue to have product silos. And, as I’ve just mentioned, interoperability referencing between data sets. So this is a sort of a marine view of the UK SDI, UK location programme design. And I think there’s a role actually here for EDINA and for Digimap. And a lot of things that we’ve been talking about are illustrated in that document.

So, just in the last couple of minutes, I just want to focus on what we’re doing in HydroSpatial. I mentioned the sort of reengineering of the data of the UK Hydrographic Office data. But what we’re also doing, and what our focus is, is going back to source information as much as possible. So actually having data, absorbing data directly from the lighthouse authorities rather than using the captured source of information that’s been derived on the paper – been digitized from the paper chart with all the issues of accuracy and what have you. We’re also working very closely with British Geological Survey on linking bathymetry with sea bed geology and also with JNCC and Sea Fast, on habitat mapping. So with bathymetry improvement, and certainly one of the things I’ll been talking to EDINA about over the next couple of months is ensuring that whatever new platform is developed, it has the capability of handling this very high quality information. And this isn’t new data – this is data that has been around in the Hydrographic Office for 20 or 30 years. Yes there are gaps, and yes we need initiatives such as the one Hugh mentioned – to go out and collect new data. But actually there’s an awful lot of data already there, and you can see just by looking at that how exciting some of the features and some of the paleo-landscapes are under the sea that you don’t see – because obviously the water is covering them – that you don’t see on traditional navigational products. It’s very important for conservation and very important for geology. And the work we’re doing with Ordnance Survey – linking our offshore tin with the on shore heights and joining that data at the coast line incorporating new data as it’s required.

On those lines – our coastal mapping improvement programme, that’s actually harmonizing HydroSpatial with Ordnance Survey MasterMap typography there. We’ve actually delivered harmonized data sets now – not available through Digimap, hopefully they will be at some point in the future – with the 8 major port sites. And a number of customers have actually contributed to that development. And our plan is to roll this out to the whole of the Great Britain over the next couple of years. And we’re already talking to a number of Hydrographic Offices and land mapping agencies overseas about the technology that we’ve developed to be able to do this.

So what is the future for marine Digimap? I sincerely hope that we’re able to …user’s of Digimap will benefit from some of the developments that we’re undertaking within HydroSpatial. I think the idea of a single service platform for reference information is definitely the way to go. And this whole semantic linking of data certainly applies to the marine sector as well as it does to some of the other sectors. And just quickly there as a warning if you like – we will be phasing out as quickly as possible data based on navigational sources. It’s not right – if you want data to navigate with buy a navigational product. What we’re talking about is comprehensive, accurate marine mapping that can be used for research and education. Thank you.