SEA develops open-source software to benefit environmental data science community

Published 8th May 2017

Cohort company SEA has developed innovative data visualisation software and made it available as open-source for the environmental data science community.

The software, developed by SEA’s Research and Technical Support (RTS) division, enables users to easily access environmental data from servers over the Internet and view it in a variety of different ways. The highly interactive data viewing enables rapid analysis and understanding of the features of complex, high dimensionality data.

RTS has used it for analysing oceanographic data variability in order to better understand military sonar performance in complex underwater environments. RTS has engaged with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Royal Navy staff to present the software capabilities and discuss uses.

The web application software architecture separates data access and manipulation from data visualisation, allowing devices running only a web browser to rapidly interact with data handled on a server or desktop PC over a network. Benefits of this approach include the potential for powerful data visualisation and interaction on low-powered mobile devices.

The UK-based company, which provides a wide range of sonar services to the defence sector, has self-funded the development and believes that the innovative software will be of benefit to environmental data scientists who need simple tools for interacting with complex data.

Marcus Donnelly, a Principal Consultant within SEA’s RTS division, explained:

“We originally developed the software to support our work in oceanography and sonar performance modelling, but realised that it could be useful for other domains. At SEA we use a lot of open-source software and data in our research and it is good to give something back to the wider community. We hope people will find new uses for the software and contribute their own modifications and enhancements.”

Python 3 users can install the software directly from the Python Package Index (pip install bokodapviewer), and the source code is available from SEA’s public repository at https://bitbucket.org/sea_dev/bokodapviewer.