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

摘要

Data availability is of vital importance for marine and oceanographic research butmost of the European data are fragmented, not always validated and not easilyaccessible. In the countries bordering the European seas, more than 1000scientific laboratories from governmental organisations and private industrycollect data using various sensors on board of research vessels, submarines, fixedand 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 distributedPan-European marine data management infrastructure for managing these largeand diverse data sets. It is interconnecting the existing professional data centres of35 countries, active in data collection and providing integrated databases ofstandardised quality on-line. This article describes the architecture and thefeatures of the SeaDataNet infrastructure. In particular it describes the wayinteroperability is achieved between all the contributing data centres. Finally ithighlights the on-going developments and challenges.