Teamsurv – community-sourcing comes to the boating world
New technologies often lead to developments that weren’t foreseen in their early days. One that is becoming more and more common with the growth of the Internet and mobile phone networks is ‘community-sourcing’, where groups with a common interest pool information for the common good in much the same way as Open Source programmers do for software.
Each project of this kind needs people with the necessary technical and management skills, access to the necessary funds, and the drive to sell the idea. Teamsurv appears to be well-provided with all three. It’s a community-sourced project whose goal is to provide freely-available detailed depth and position information for the shallow waters frequented by yachstmen, divers, fishermen, workboat operators – in fact, any recreational or commercial user of shallow inshore waters. Volunteers use either a software application running on their onboard PC or a hardware data logger, attached to their GPS and echo sounder.
Teamsurv’s ultimate goal is to cover any location in the world where they can find volunteers. Even now, you are welcome to submit data from anywhere, but Teamsurv are testing their system for manipulating the data (correcting for the height of the tide at the time of logging, as well as a few more subtle things) on the following four trial areas:
- UK South coast, Poole to Chichester
- UK East coast, Thames Estuary to the Wash
- France: Brittany coast including Golfe du Morbihan
- Lithuania: Curonian Lagoon, Klaipeda and adjacent coastline
One consequence of this is that the associated website is in three laguages – English, French and Lithuanian – which makes it pretty unusual.
If you sail or motor (or if your rowing boat carries a GPS and echo sounder, for that matter), why not volunteer? Once you’ve set up your PC application, or borrowed one of their hardware data loggers, all you have to do is upload the data when you get home or when you next manage to access a wi-fi point.
For details, and an interesting blog, see the teamsurv website
TeamSurv’s research is being part-funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 247998) and aims to demonstrate that the more accurate positioning made possible by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) may permit community-sourced depth sounder information to be used as a low cost source of survey data, with comparable quality to traditional survey techniques.
