Project Status

The MERMAID project is now officially complete.

The final review for the project occurred at the EU offices in Brussels on 23^rd July 2002. The final system prototype was demonstrated to the Project Officer, M Guy Weets, and three independent external reviewers (M. Bernard Donnay, Mr Keith Jeffrey and Prof. Wolf-Fritz Reikert), along with the project documentation, including the Exploitation Plan and the Technical Implementation Plan. The project was deemed as successfully complete, and officially ended at the end of July 2002.

It was concluded that the project successfully delivered a fully working prototype of an Internet-based Data Broker aimed at the marine emergency response domain. All of the initial objectives, and the detailed user requirements were met, and the project has therefore demonstrated the technical feasibility of such a broker system. However, the prototype will require some further refinements before being ready for full commercial deployment, and following a full marketing analysis, the project consortium have concluded that the system is not currently commercially viable. Despite this fact, the potential of exploiting the system itself still remains, and the consortium will actively be looking for external investors to develop the system. In addition, many technological lessons have been learnt, which are likely to be exploited by the consortium partners in other areas. Finally, it is felt that the project has made a positive contribution in the field of environmental data exchange and particularly in the area of metadata. The project has moved a step closer to realising a formalised international metadata standard.

To download the Final Report (in pdf format), click here

Progress Reports   

Under the IST agreement, the Mermaid Consortium produced 9 quarterly progress reports, and a final report, beginning in March 2000. These are all in PDF format, and can be downloaded from the links below. :