Intellectual Merit: This work is a five-year renewal of support for the development and maintenance of the MB-system, an open source, freely available software package for the processing and display of swath mapping sonar data. It includes the development of functionality as well as visualization tools for editing bathymetry, analyzing sonar bias parameters, and real-time survey display. The work permits on-going user support, improvement of software documentation, and support for new sonar data formats. The heart of the system is an input/output library that allows programs to work transparently with any of the 61 supported swath sonar data formats. Through this approach, generic utilities can be developed that can be applied in a uniform manner to sonar data from a variety of sources. Data to which this software is applied includes bathymetry, beam intensity, and sides can data.
Broader Impacts: Broader impacts of the work are increasing the infrastructure for science, serving the needs of researchers using multi-beam sonar data for marine geology and geophysics research, and facilitating data analysis and visualization. This work supports researchers at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
MB-System is an open source software package for processing and display of seafloor swath mapping data. It was originally developed under SunOS and Irix. It has been subsequently installed under a broad range of "unix-like" operating systems such as various Linux distributions and MacOS. There are options for installing it under versions of Windows using Cygwin (www.cygwin.com/). MB-System is widely used in the US and overseas by scientists, students, engineers, and technicians to analyze data from multibeam swath mapping echosounders. MB-System originally consisted of command-line only applications but over the years we have added a number go tools with relatively modern graphical user interfaces. The MB-System software is available for download by anonymous ftp from: ftp://ftp.ldeo.columbia.edu/MB-Ssytem and the source code is available from our Subversion repository at http://svn.ilab.ldeo.columbia.edu/ Documentation and instructions for installation are available at: www.ldeo.columbia.edu/MB-System As an open source effort, MB-System it is interesting to evaluate the number of users as a measure of impact. In short, In 2012, we did an evaluation of users during the 2011 calendar year. The MB-System source distribution was downloaded 2535 times from our ftp serer to 925 unique ip addresses. In many cases, the ip addresses are resolved to identifiable domain addresses but the majority of downloads are either unresolved or resolve to commercial service providers. Downloading the software does not necessarily mean that it was used. That said, we do know that at some institutions there are many users who use a local version that might only be downloaded once for each release. The downloads during 2011 break down as: U.S. Academic institutions (41) Non-U.S. Academic (68) U.S. Government Agency (11) Non-U.S. Government Agency (40) Commercial US and International (37) More detail of our simple evaluation of downloads is available at: www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/MB-System/Userbase/index.html In addition to direct downloads, compiled MB-System distributions are available for Mac OS X through the Fink Project, for Red Hat Linux systems through the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Shipboard Technical Support group, and as part of the Poseiden Linux distribution (an Ubuntu variant). We have no tracking of MB-System installations through these other distributions, but it is anecdotally clear that these are increasingly popular. Thus, a large part of the community that downloads the MB-System source distributions is undocumented.
