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Electronic Catch and Effort Reporting System

Overview

The Electronic Catch and Effort Reporting System (ECERS) contains software for the vessel, the fleet owner and fishing authority, all connected via an email network. This allows a report submitted by a skipper to the fishing authority to be simultaneously copied and collated to a fleet owner, the skipper's home and/or his office.

ECERS is a means of acquiring data in near real-time and then delivering that data to those with a need-to-know. This data can extent far beyond catch data and can include sensor data, B2B and worksheets.

The offline nature of the fisheries environment and the need for a consistent interface onboard the vessel, at the wharf, at the fisherman's home and at the office, implies that in most cases an Email, rather than a WEB solution, should be used. Thus email will be the necessary component for ECERS electronic delivery because it can pervade all aspects of fishery operations. There is also a need for the delivery protocol of ECERS data to the fishery administrator to be optimised for the communications environment, which in the case of Inmarsat-C is reasonably expensive. Thus newer WEB database technologies (such as XML) will be a major stumbling block to the uptake of ECERS in the Inmarsat-C environment. Because it is the fisherman who sends the ECERS reports, learns and uses the email environment, and maintains the VMS system onboard, his immediate needs should be served with value add functionality. TerraVision has approached this by providing users with tools to:

1. view ECERS data spatially overlayed on his navigation maps;
2. distributing ECERS data to office or home;
3. automatically collating incoming ECERS data from several vessels at home;
4. accessing the GPS of the Inmarsat device through the plotter; and
5. and providing the owner with the option to utilise the VMS environment to track the vessel by 3rd party tracking systems, thus providing a "tell someone who cares" level of redundancy in the safety environment; And the email system built on top of the Inmarsat VMS platform can, cost effectively:
6. Provide him with a useful communications environment;
7. Enable use of B2B tools to sell (or not sell) catch and thus optimise effort;
8. Enable the user to receive high-resolution weather information in a cost effective manner.