Sea water distributed monitoring system: A proposal for architecture and data format

Marine pollution is known and investigated. In the case of economic exploitation of marine waters, i.e. aquaculture and recreational activities, continuous monitoring of their quality is necessary. Commercial sensors may be used for speditive water monitoring but are usually used as stand-alone systems with limited applications. In this article, after a brief review of commercial sensors as real time detectors of the relevant chemical/biological parameters, experimental data on aquaculture plants are presented. The final objective is to produce through techniques of data fusion from heterogeneous sources with a synthetic representation of the information that may be also used for early warning. Both data format and data architecture are covered.