Research Made Easy

With their web-based data management system DSHIP the German-based company Werum Software & Systems supports maritime research on board of research vessels all over the world.

The Instagram profile of the current climate research expedition MOSAiC in the North Polar Sea shows straightaway: research work on the high seas may be really fascinating, but it also is extremely laborious, fragmented and highly complex. As they depend on the various environmental conditions like wind speed or water temperature, hardly any of the measurements taken could be repeated - a huge challenge to humans and technical equipment. Vast quantities of context data, such as the ship's position, the water depth and the entire weather data, are acquired on board the research vessels to support the scientists in filing and evaluating their actual research findings. The scientists can link the context data to the data they acquired themselves and reconcile them. This way, additional evaluation options arise incidentally. The demands on a software that reads, collects and visualizes such data on board are accordingly high: the system must be absolutely reliable and easy to operate for any user; and it has to go without any administrator throughout the whole expedition.
Werum Software & Systems has been providing such a robust and easy-to-handle software solution for more than 20 years. Its first version was installed on the German research vessel Meteor back in 1997. Ever since, many other research vessels have been equipped with DSHIP all over the globe, for example in South Korea, Scotland and Argentina. In Germany, DSHIP is presently running on four large-scale German research vessels and a number of smaller ones - as of recently, also on the fishery research vessels "Solea" and "Clupea" of the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE). When DSHIP was installed on the Clupea in summer last year, the system showed another of its strong points: despite the many configuration options, its installation does not take much time - in case of the Clupea, the period between order placement and acceptance was no more than four weeks. And the summary the chief scientist of the Baltic International Trawl Survey with the Solea, Dr Andres Velasco, scientific employee at the Th?nen Institute for Baltic Sea Fisheries, delivered at the end of the expedition was downright positive: "We are very glad we switched to DSHIP - the system runs absolutely reliable and is really easy to operate. The many new possibilities that we have now to acquire, visualize and evaluate the data of our expeditions are a tremendous boon."
DSHIP's latest versions are web-based so that any scientists can download the data they need on environmental conditions, travel route and many other parameters directly onto their computers and use them for their own research purposes - on board the ship or after the end of the actual expedition. With developments like this, the IT company Werum, which has a staff of 125 and is based in Lueneburg in the north of Germany, has established its reputation in this line of business over the years. "Our aim is to understand our customers and their task settings so well that we can implement their wishes in our solutions and, on top of it, can suggest new developments," says Christian Sommer, chairman of the Executive Board of Werum Software & Systems, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019. Christian Sommer has been with the company for more than 30 years and was involved in the development of the first DSHIP versions at that time. A phenomenon that is not uncommon with Werum, there is only little staff turnover - hardly surprising in view of diverse projects like DSHIP which among others include on-site maintenance operations in New Zealand or Cape Town. In the event that problems arise during expeditions that don't come within the regular maintenance, Werum's entire project team is available by e-mail, phone or satellite.
And which way is the wind blowing? "More and more ships, such as cruise liners or racing yachts, are taking on recording measurement data for scientific use during their trips," Ralf Loewenberg, project manager for DSHIP on Solea and Clupea, explains. "So, many new application possibilities are opening up for our system at the moment." Environmental observation as a whole, for maritime research as well as for more topic challenges like climate change, is advancing at a breathtaking pace and needs reliable software systems designed to safely collect, link, visualize and store data that are increasing in amounts as well as complexity. Well, Werum is all set for it.

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With a workforce of over 120, Werum Software & Systems AG is one of the largest independent employers for IT professionals in Germany. For more than 50 years Werum has been implementing sophisticated software and systems for customers all over the world, among them many renowned companies from the automotive and aerospace industry as well as scientific institutions and public authorities.
Werum's activities focus on the support of customer-specific processes in the core areas of test data and information management, earth observation, eGovernment and enterprise information management. The software solutions are based on platforms specially developed for these areas.

This release was published on openPR.