ODSS: A decision support system for ocean exploration

We have designed, built, tested and fielded a decision support system which provides a platform for situational awareness, planning, observation, archiving and data analysis. While still in development, our inter-disciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, biologists and oceanographers has made extensive use of our system in at-sea experiments since 2010. The novelty of our work lies in the targeted domain, its evolving functionalities that closely tracks how ocean scientists are seeing the evolution of their own work practice, and its actual use by engineers, scientists and marine operations personnel. We describe the architectural elements and lessons learned over the more than two years use of the system.