The vast scale of the
oceans, the difficulty and expense of making measurements due to the hostility of the environment and the internationality of the marine environment has led to a culture of
data sharing in the
oceanographic data community. As far back as 1961
UNESCO's
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) set up IODE (International Oceanographic Data Exchange, subsequently renamed International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange to reflect the increasing importance of metadata) to enhance
marine research, exploitation and development by facilitating the exchange of oceanographic data and information.
Traditionally, oceanographic data exchange was based on manual transactions involving delivery of physical packages of data on
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magne ...
,
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...
or more recently by electronic
FTP transfer. However, the increasing need of
climate scientist
Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , ''-logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of stu ...
s for regional or global data syntheses to support their modelling activities requires automation of the data exchange process. Consequently, oceanographic data managers are developing 'virtual
data centres' to support the distribution of data through software agents.
Distributed data systems are critically dependent on machine-readable metadata to provide information on such issues as physical access protocols and semantics of the data. It is essential that this
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
conforms to agreed standards to prevent the computing paradigm of '
garbage in, garbage out' blighting automated data exchange. for example if a data description of 'temperature' were allowed it could lead to the merging of sea temperature data from one centre with air temperature data from another.
Many of these standards are community based, such as the CF conventions developed for
global climate modelling. Significant progress documenting these informal standards leading to exposure and encouragement of best practice has been made by the Marine Metadata Interoperability project.
However, if the oceanographic community is to emulate the success of the spatial data community in the development of data
interoperability then a more formalised standards development framework is required. To this end an ocean data standards review, development and publication infrastructure is being developed under the auspices of the Joint
WMO-IOC Technical Commission on Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM).
Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission on Oceanography and Marine Meteorology
/ref>
References
The Ocean Data Standards website
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External links
Ocean Data Standards
Oceanography