NEPTUNE Canada

Intriguing challenges—Innovative solutions

As a large, complex, multi-year seafloor observatory, the NEPTUNE Canada project presents intriguing challenges for project engineers and technologists. New solutions are required in many disciplines. For example, biofouling-the growth of organisms on sensors-is a potentially severe problem for deployment periods longer than a few months. And corrosion poses unknown risks to sensor integrity, particularly in harsh seafloor environments like those at Endeavour Ridge and near Barkley Canyon.

New frontiers in computer science and data management

The long-term acquisition, management, and innovative presentation of a wide variety of sensor data are also daunting tasks. There are new frontiers in data management to explore as NEPTUNE Canada evolves:

• Automated feature recognition for photographic and video imagery
• Complex event detection algorithms, which will be able to generate automated alerts for researchers after correlating different types of phenomena
• Annual archiving of terabytes of data, which can be efficiently stored, yet readily accessed by researchers
• New on-line tools for visualization, analysis, exchange and collaboration to help scientists make the most of the unprecedented uninterrupted data flow