Live Tide and Weather Using Twitter
Ohmex is to present a solution providing live updates on tides and weather through Twitter. Demonstrations of live data from a gauge located along the eastern side of the NOC dock area are taking place during Ocean Business 2013, to be held from 9 to 11 April 2013 in Southampton, UK.
The demo data will be available to 'follow' on www.twitter.com/ohmex or can be viewed on www.tidegauge.com.
The original suggestion for a social network based data service came from a pilot working at a port on the North East coast of England. Using harbour instruments made by Ohmex the pilot found on occassions he had to berth a vessel when the harbour office was closed and nobody could relay the tide and weather information to the vessel on its approach. The suggested IT solution was for a web-based service with the pilot using a tablet application to view the data. However, this suggestion did not allow for the poor internet service available offshore. The solution that proved most reliable was to use the Twitter service as it was available for both web-based users and SMS text messages. Advantages of using Twitter as the data service provider include:
- Gauge location information embedded in tweets
- UTC timestamp embedded in data tweets
- Last two days tweets available directly online
- User controlled tweet 'following' and distribution
- Data tweets available as direct SMS message.
- Data available by mobile web applications and clients.
