1 Mobile and Web-based Services for Ship Operation and Survey: A Portal-centric Approach

It is highly desirable that ships operate safely 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To achieve this, ship classification societies supply ship owners and operators with suites of IT-supported services, increasingly web-based and highly personalized. Access to such services is required worldwide and timely by ship owners, ship surveyors and head-office staff. Depending on connectivity and context, a variety of different working environments has to be supported: offline and online, mobile and stationary, public and private etc. The project reported here investigates suites of services for several classes of use cases: − web-based ship information and calculation services for classification society staff, − web- and mobile interface-based ship status checking for ship owners, and − offline and re-synchronized task execution for ship surveyors with mobile devices. State-of-the-art web and mobile system technology has proven to be suitable for the design and realization of integrated portal systems supporting such suites of services. The results presented here are the outcome of a joint national R&D project