SeaDataNet-Pan-European infrastructure for marine and ocean data management:unified access to distributed data sets

Data availability is of vital importance for marine and oceanographic research but most of the European data are fragmented,not always validated and not easily accessible.In the countries bordering the European seas,more than 1000 scientific laboratories from governmental organisations and private industry collect data using various sensors on board of research vessels,submarines,fixed and drifting platforms,aeroplanes and satellites to measure physical,geophysical,geological,biological and chemical parameters,biological species and others.SeaDataNet is an Integrated Research Infrastructure Initiative(I3)(2006-2011)in the EU FP6 framework programme.It is developing an efficient distributed Pan-European marine data management infrastructure for managing these large and diverse data sets.It is interconnecting the existing professional data centres of 35 countries,active in data collection and providing integrated databases of standardised quality on-line.This article describes the architecture and the features of the SeaDataNet infrastructure.In particular it describes the way interoperability is achieved between all the contributing data centres.Finally it highlights the on-going developments and challenges.

Putting meaning into NETMAR-the open service network for marine environmental data

The open service network for marine environmental data(NETMAR)project uses semantic web technologies in its pilot system which aims to allow users to search,download and integrate satellite,in situ and model data from open ocean and coastal areas.The semantic web is an extension of the fundamental ideas of the World Wide Web,building aweb of datathrough annotation of metadata and data with hyperlinked resources.Within the framework of the NETMAR project,an interconnected semantic web resourcewasdeveloped to aid in dataandweb service discovery and to validate Open Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service orchestration.A second semantic resource was developed to support interoper-ability of coastal web atlases across jurisdictional boundaries.This paper outlines the approach taken to producing the resource registry used within the NETMAR project and demonstrates the use of these semantic resources to support user interactions with systems.Such interconnected semantic resources allow the increased ability to share and disseminate data through the facilitation of interoperability between data providers.The formal representation of geospatial knowledge to advance geospatial interoperability is a growing research area.Tools and methods such as those outlined in this paper have the potential to support these efforts.