Marine Recorder Online Support & Hosting - 2025 onwards

Description

Project Background

The platform is a replacement for the old "Marine Recorder" desktop application, which is at end-of-life and no longer sustainable for business use. It is used by all of the UK SCNBs (JNCC, Natural England, NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales, DAERA), along with key marine NGOs, who provide high quality marine benthic survey evidence.
The old Marine Recorder was developed in the 2000s and was showing its age in both the software used, and data model, making maintenance and support unsustainable in the long term, in addition to the quantity of stored data nearing software limitations within Microsoft Access itself. A review of the current system was carried out in 2016, under the Streamlining Marine Advice innovation lab. 
The geospatial biodiversity and accessory data within the platform will be curated under the custodianship of a closed list of custodian organisations, the only route for data into the system being via one of these organisations who will provide the overall responsibility of quality control and data entry.
Data within the system is key to a wide variety of UK and international marine and conservation reporting objectives and forms the backbone of many policy decisions and further informative datasets across all countries in the UK. As such, it contains a reporting application, to provide key stakeholders the ability to query and extract final data in the system for their public task needs, and to their level of data access.
Data entry to the system is currently via UI and spreadsheet import, with Restful JSON API planned for development shortly.
Marine Recorder Online is multi-tenant, providing each custodian their own domain for their data management application in which they manage their own data according to their internal business needs and data release practices. All relevant final data are subsequently pooled in the reporting system to provide a full UK view of marine biodiversity data, but with access defined by row level permissions on the data to match the end user's access level. The system itself is administrated by a designated organisation, currently JNCC, in charge of managing the users, internal dictionaries, configuration updates, triaging new support tickets and responding to Tier 1 support.
The application currently receives hosting and support for Tier 2, 3 and 4 issues under contract, this ITT seeks to provide continued support and hosting for the application moving forward.