Leveraging US-R2R and EU-ODIP Informatics for International Marine Science
Since the 2009 launch, the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R; http://rvdata.us/) program has made dramatic progress in routinely capturing shipboard data from the entire US academic fleet of 25 active service vessels. The R2R team has developed innovative technology to overcome the wide diversity of data practices, naming conventions and data formats across the fleet, which is managed by 18 independent operating institutions, large and small. As of September 2012, R2R had cataloged 11,026,386 data files from 2,644 cruises.
These NSF-funded accomplishments clearly benefit the US research community, but inquiries in the marine sciences are becoming more global in scope. While other nations and regions, notably the Europeans and the Australians, have also made tremendous progress in gathering data sets and placing them online, inevitably barriers to discovery and access can exist for a host of reasons, from basic awareness of resources to conflicts in search and access protocols, naming conventions and data formats.
Rather than continuing to independently develop (expensive) wheels, ODIP proposes to establish formal collaboration mechanisms to synchronize US, European and Australian efforts with a series of technical workshops designed to make practical advances, rather than a series of meetings in which PI?s stand up and make presentations. The Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP) has been launched as a combined US-EU-Australian project specifically because ocean data interoperability must span national boundaries.
R2R is a collaborative NSF program, funded through 31 August 2014, combining the efforts of LDEO, SIO, WHOI and FSU. The R2R team requests funding to (1) enhance the flexible discovery and harvesting of R2R content through implementing a ?Linked Data? approach; (2) map key vocabularies used by R2R to their EU counterparts, allowing users to search across US and EU resources using the terms with which they are familiar; and (3) upgrade existing R2R ISO 19115 metadata records to be compliant with the EU INSPIRE schema, which specifically addresses documenting quality. These efforts will be carried out in coordination with a number of other current interoperability projects, such as the work of the EarthCube Interoperability Concept Group, Unidata, and the COOPEUS project.
