Med&BS RDBFIS-III, establishment of the regional database for the Mediterranean and Black seas

The RDBFIS-III project (“Establishment of the Regional Database for the Mediterranean and Black Seas”) represents a significant consolidation and maturation of the Regional Database Fisheries Information System (RDBFIS) as a regional scientific and operational infrastructure supporting fisheries data management, validation, harmonisation, analysis, and reporting in the Mediterranean and Black Sea region.

Building upon the technical and institutional foundations established during previous project phases, RDBFIS-III focused on ensuring the continued operational availability of the platform, strengthening its scientific and technical capabilities, expanding its analytical services, improving interoperability with external institutional systems, and preparing the system for transition to a permanent European hosting environment.

A central achievement of the project was the uninterrupted operation, maintenance, and technical strengthening of the RDBFIS platform. Throughout the implementation period, the infrastructure remained fully operational, supported by continuous monitoring, issue tracking, cybersecurity controls, backup and recovery procedures, and systematic performance optimisation.

The platform’s architecture, based on containerised deployment, a PostgreSQL database environment, Java/Spring Boot backend services, Angular frontend components, and R-based scientific processing services, was further refined to improve performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.

Database restructuring, optimisation of indexes and query execution, schema refinement, improved relational integrity, and strengthened backup and disaster- recovery mechanisms substantially increased the operational robustness of the infrastructure and its readiness for future migration into a larger institutional hosting environment.