Prof. Georgios Sylaios, Coordinator of the ODYSSEA project, presented the EU-funded project at the 12th Panhellenic Symposium of Oceanography & Fisheries, held May 30 – June 3, 2018 at the Ionian University in Corfu.
The event focused on “Blue Growth for the Adriatic-Ionian Macro-region and the Eastern Mediterranean”.
The symposium was hosted by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science of the Ionian University, and brought together the academic and research communities of the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
“ODYSSEA is a system bridging the gap between operational oceanography capacities and the need for information on marine conditions from the community of end-users,” Prof. Sylaios of ODYSSEA Lead partner Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH) told participants. “ODYSSEA’s ambition is to develop an interoperable, fully-integrated and cost-effective multiplatform network of observing and forecasting systems across the Mediterranean basin, addressing both the open sea and the coastal zone.”
Prof. Sylaios described the ODYSSEA platform, network of observatories, sensing mechanisms, outputs and end-user services, and other aspects of the project.
He sketched ODYSSEA’s primary achievements to date, 11 months after its launching in June 2017, and called attention to the upcoming ODYSSEA summer school, to be held in Kavala, Greece in September 2018.
“There was strong interest in ODYSSEA partners using social media as a means of introducing to end-users’innovative knowledge-based tools, products and services that seek to improve their daily operations, and help them build new business models,” Sylaios noted.
“Symposium participants recognized in ODYSSEA a promising initiative and were particularly interested by the upcoming launch of the ODYSSEA platform and the installation and operation of the instrumentation which in combination with constant reaching-out activities to key-users constitute a coherent set designed to support sustainable and innovative Blue Growth in the Mediterranean,” he added.
Dr. Nikolaos Kokkos, also of the DUTH Department of Environmental Engineering, presented past and current achievements related to the operational oceanography of the Northern Aegean and Thracian Seas.
