Overview
Marine parks are areas which deserve an extremely accurate care of the ecosystem and as such are usually subject to severe restrictions applied to their end users, first of all leisure boats and local operators.
Those restrictions are often different in different areas depending onto the level of threat that anthropogenic activities may exercise on local environment. As an example, in some areas boat transit may be fully prohibited, in others fishing and anchorage, in others night anchorage, etc.
In order to limit and control the access to restricted areas, very often parks management organisations force users to request for a permit (e.g. daily or weekly, free of charge or not) without which the boats are not allowed to enter the marine park. In compliance with the different ways for accessing the park, also permits are different (e.g. transit and anchorage, shore fishing, sea fishing, scuba diving…).
The main objectives of the Meduse Project can be summarised as follows:
a) To develop a prototype service infrastructure for the delivery of location based services within restricted access maritime areas (parks, reserves) to the following customer categories:
i. Institutional – Marine parks and restricted marine areas management institutions;
ii. Private - Marine parks and restricted marine areas users (leisure boats);
iii. Commercial – Commercial operators acting within restricted areas (e.g. cruise boats);
iv. Law Enforcement – Maritime police authorities (Coast Guard).
b) To demonstrate a subset of services and applications (with limited functionality) that shall be enabled by the service infrastructure for all the above listed customer categories;
c) To analyse commercial sustainability of the service infrastructure in order to identify and characterise the critical mass of applications and services that shall bring sustainability and define associated service models towards the different customer categories.