Oculus Sea

OCULUS SEA is a C2 platform for Maritime Surveillance. The platform consists of “loosely coupled” National/ Regional and Local C2 Centers which are “centrally governed”.“Loosely coupled” as C2 Centers are located separately, share their Situational Pictures via a Message Oriented Middleware but preserve their administrational and operational autonomy.“Centrally governed” as there exists a central governance mechanism at the NCC that registers, authenticates and authorizes Regional and Local C2 centers into the OCULUS SEA  network.

The “Situational Picture” is a basic concept for any Maritime Surveillance System and thus for OCULUS SEA as well. According to the European Border Surveillance System ( known as EUROSUR), the situational picture is “a graphical interface to present real-time data, information and intelligence received from different authorities, sensors, platforms and other sources”; In practice, this definition includes numerous and heterogeneous types of entities which we call “Layers”. OCULUS SEA supports numerous types of “Layers”, most important of which are:

• Data Layers: Vessel Tracks collected from AIS, VMS, surveillance radars, IR, FLIR and video cameras, AVL systems, Meteorological/ Oceanic now-cast and forecast data;
• Information Layers: Command and Control messages exchanged across C2 centers and in-field assets like Patrol vessels, aircrafts or vehicles. Typical examples are events, missions & collection plans, orders; Video and images from suspect vessels;
• Intelligence Layers that optimize and improve the situational awareness: Intelligence reports coming from third bodies and authorities like FRONTEX; Intelligence produced through the system. Typical examples are Track fusion, data mining and spatio-temporal statistical tools.

After Building the Situational Picture, the challenge is to share it. Sharing occurs across OCULUS National, Regional, Local C2 centers and infield assets. “Layers” are shared asynchronously using Java Messaging Service (JMS). “Layers” should be compatible with the OCULUS data model specification which based on widely accepted standards.

OCULUS SEA is designed to offer interoperability, extensibility, scalability and resilience.