The Urgent call on data management: are we capable to store valuable (meta)data for naval application?

Technology is increasing rapidly and new concepts as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) or augmented reality are entering the daily life. Nevertheless, the maritime world is not immune to the disrupting advancing in technology and information production especially regarding shipping industry, military, and monitoring methodologies. The basic will is automatization, efficiencies, and safety at affordable costs. Therefore, in parallel, other aspects are evolving, mostly related to interoperability and data management. An enormous amount of information is produced and the necessity to store in an appropriate way is demanding. In this contest, an interdisciplinary environmental data model for mine countermeasure application is proposed where heterogeneous environmental information is integrated as a base structure for a future data management system. The attention was posed not only on measurable data related to various disciplines such as physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and acoustics, but also on historical data and subjective interpretation such as descriptions and lesson learned. In the model a distinction was made between “humans” and “machines”. The humans are seen as entities that must collect and store data, meanwhile the machines are seen as entities that query information. In this way the model shows what to take into consideration when to collect and store data, how to integrate data following rules and style conventions, how to build a conceptual table with heterogeneous information, what are the tools to allow the interrogation of measured, historical, and subjective-descriptive data. The possibility to automatically access heterogeneous data volume opens a broad spectrum of possibilities, from a characterization of a marine environment to the representation of a marine environment by virtual reality, to a sensor performance prediction, to risk analysis.