The datum was set to WGS84 and the UTM projection (zone 37) was chosen for navigation and display, and data acquisition. The time zone was set to the local time (UTC+2) for the whole data acquisition process, except for the SBP data that was recorded in UTC.
The positioning maps and bathymetric images were done with GMT [Wessel and Smith (1995)]. The multibeam data were pre processed on board by the PDS-2000, CARAIBES, NEPTUNE and MB-SYSTEM softwares.
Bathymetric data were complimented by the GEBCO data. On-land SRTM topography data was used for structural analysis, after conversion to NETCDF GMT grid files.
The computing center used three INTEL based PC running the SUSE GNU-Linux and the Microsoft Windows 2000 O.S., and two SUN workstations running Solaris 8, in addition to some portable computer for data acquisition and efficient data processing.
Photographs were taken by digital cameras.
The Linux machines were used as data repositories using the SAMBA software. A WWW server on a Linux machine was used to share ongoing information and results.