SmartWave: a Smart Platform for Marine Environmental Monitoring

In recent years, the interest in the study of seas and oceans has dramatically increased as they are considered of primary importance for forecasting catastrophic events or for supporting blue economy, as well as the marine tourism, improving the tourist reception or enhancing any marine-related activity. This led to the development of IT platforms that allow to monitor the marine environment and provide a number of services to different kinds of final users, whether they are private individuals interested in the status of the seas, or companies whose business depends on the marine environmental monitoring. The main limitations of current platforms are due to such a difference between free trials, which often focus only on specific aspects of deep waters, and subscriptions, which provide analyzes whose reliability is generally not proportional to the costs. This paper presents SmartWave, a project funded by Regione Sicilia (European Regional Development Fund), that aims to develop a novel IT platform to observe and predict phenomena that characterize the marine environment, while also providing the consumer with a unified portal to collect, access and analyze marine-related information. To achieve this goal, one of the main challenges of this project is to aggregate and standardize heterogeneous data from multiple sources in order to offer very accurate information to private or business consumers.