About i-MAPS
Navielektro i-MAPS is our response to the problems that have developed due to the ever-increasing electronic exchange of information. Today, much of the information needed for daily decision-making is only available through specialized interfaces, designed only for one specific task, forcing the user to browse between various websites and applications to get the information required.
Navielektro offers a solution that enables users to integrate various maritime information sources into a common MAPS (Maritime Awareness Portal System). The portal is built with an emphasis on a GIS (Geographical Information System) view of the data. The portal enables each user to customize the view of the portal depending on the operational preference of the user as well as possible system security constraints (as all information might not be available for all users).

Operational Objective
The operational objective of the MAPS portal is to enable the users to access and view information that is available from different sources in a coherent and user-friendly fashion. The portal is utilizing various existing SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based services for collecting the situational awareness information from a number of existing sources. In addition, thanks to the SOA based XML and RDF interfaces, the portal may easily be integrated to retrieve information from other information sources as well. The portal is built using open industry standards such as:

The portal system enables virtually anyone equipped with a modern Internet WWW-browser to view operational data on the PC or workstation.

The system enables the user to view the information from the various systems on top of a chart based visualization layer. The application enables the users to zoom and pan the chart in order to view the status and information with an accuracy that suits the current need; be it a general overview or viewing a specific situation. Each user that is qualified to connect to the system has a role-based profile that determines which functionality is available to the user.

The goal of the portal is to create a system of systems where all the information that is relevant to maritime information may be presented in a coherent fashion.

i-MAPS Integration Philosophy
The portal platform enables an easy way to develop add-on functionalities to the system, as new information content may dynamically be added to the portal. The i-MAPS is currently built using open-source middle-layer tools with respect to the following:

In addition a combination of existing information services may be integrated to the Portal using a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The system currently supports a mix of services with a REST, JMS (ESB) as well as SOAP based services for information retrieval. The i-VMS system is able to both consume and produce similar SOA services and they may thus be shared between the systems.

The implementation relies to the extent possible on standards such as JSR-168 Portlet container specification, but some integration is specific to the used portal container.

The portal platform is capable of running add-on functionality using the Portlet technology, where each Portlet becomes a separate window with its own functionality.