Efficient data management is one of the core features of SeaView. It enables fast rendering, batch processing, and efficient spatial queries.

These distinctive features rely on the same foundation, an integral part of every operating system: its file system. A SeaView project is just a folder that you can copy or move. You can even feed it to a data compression utility to create a compressed file for backup.

As simple and effective as this design proves to be at run time, it has its limitations:

• It's unsuitable for teamwork: sharing the same project between different users requires you to supervise the merging in a time-consuming and error-prone process.
• There is no support for incremental updates of backup copies.
• The consistency and security of data are not guaranteed.
• Even in compressed form, sharing a project requires a significant bandwidth, especially for offshore operations.

Therefore, starting from version 4.0 we introduced SeaView Archives: a new data format for geophysical projects.

Data compression in a nutshell

Data compression is a technique that allows downsizing the footprint of a certain amount of information, filtering out data redundancy.

How this is achieved and thus, the quantity of data that is removed, is algorithm-dependant, but there are essentially two modes:

• Loss-less compression: the original information can be fully recovered from the compressed data.
• Lossy compression: a little part of the information is lost in the compression process, typically to achieve a better compression ratio.

General-purpose compression techniques are data and application agnostic. They simply analyze raw bit sequences and perform their magic.

We designed a lossy compression scheme that limits the functionalities, not the data resolution.

SeaView Archives is different. It uses an intelligent compression scheme that allows you to create either loss-less or lossy archives. But in the latter case, instead of losing information in terms of data quality or resolution, you only sacrifice the ability to perform some operations in SeaView.

We call this special kind of archives stripped and they are intended for several use cases.

A scenario for Stripped archives

Suppose you are on board your vessel during the survey operations and that you are involved in the crude processing of data for QC purposes.

You may want to share the newly acquired and processed data with your teammate taking care of interpretation onshore. But sharing the whole project folder, even compressed, could be problematic due to bandwidth limitations.

In this case, you can create a stripped archive of your project. It will contain all the data needed to perform interpretation at full resolution, for example, picking sonar contacts on side-scan lines or drawing reflectors on sub-bottom profiles.

People onshore will be able to perform their duties with no practical limitation other than re-process the data.

Thanks to the fact that the size of a stripped archive is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of a regular (loss-less) SeaView Archive, you can transfer it via a satellite connection.

You can then merge processing and interpretation in a second moment, whenever convenient for you to share a regular SeaView archive.

Solid vs. Incremental archives

SeaView Archives also provides an incremental backup solution suitable for single users and teams.

Incremental archives span over several files, one for each revision of your project, and store what's changed compared to the previous one only.

Creating an incremental archive is so simple, that it is indeed the default mode of operation. Every time, SeaView will automatically scan the destination folder looking for previously created archives and determine what's changed and needs to be updated.

When you decide to uncompress the archive, SeaView will automatically enumerate its parts and perform a merging of subsequent project revisions in the process.

Of course, stripped archives can be incremental too.

Easily merge partial results, and resolve conflicts automatically

SeaView Archives minimizes the risk of data loss and corruption through its conflict detection system.

Concerning the use case described above, it is not difficult to imagine a slightly different scenario where you can use an incremental backup to reduce the size of data to transfer without even penalizing the capabilities of the other members of your team.

Consistency and security

SeaView Archives feature built-in data consistency and support strong data encryption as an option. In this way, SeaView can easily detect damaged archive files and guarantee data confidentiality.