Marine Information Skyway Initiative

Canadian Centre for Marine Communications (CCMC) on behalf of the Communications Research Centre and the Canadian Space Agency seeks expressions of interest from parties wishing to undertake projects under CCMC's Marine Information Skyway investment initiative.

The objective of the initiative is to encourage Canadian SMEs to develop and commercialize satellite communications products and services for application in the oceans sector. With the advance of remote sensing technology, more cost effective, reliable communications, and more powerful electronic navigation tools, the foundation for an Information Skyway has been laid. Information Skyway will facilitate simple third party access to marine environmental and operational information in real time or near real time.

The basic premise is to create and support an infrastructure and culture to enable the broad marine sector to use and benefit from information technology with the same ubiquity as business and industry on land. It will embody tools to record, save, manage, model, analyze and access data, and present the results as textual and graphical information to a broad base of expert and non-expert users. In this current round of project investment, CCMC is seeking projects that focus on development and commercialization of innovative products and applications that stimulate satellite usage and address the themes of ocean observation and information management. Specific areas of interest include:

• Ocean Resource Management
• Fisheries Management
• Ocean Science
• Marine Security and Sovereignty
• Marine Transportation
• Safety of Navigation