GOT DATA? CURRENT APPROACHES TO IMPROVING DATA DISCOVERY AND ACCESS

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) ensures the security and widespread availability of geophysical data through long-term stewardship. This mission has been reinforced and strengthened through participation in a variety of international programs, including hosting a World Data Service for Geophysics and hosting the International Hydrographic Organization’s Data Center for Digital Bathymetry. While the mission to provide long-term scientific data stewardship ensuring quality, integrity, and accessibility has remained largely unchanged for more than 200 years, the methods and technologies used have changed drastically. We describe the overarching framework of data services, web applications, data management, and data citation used to ensure easy discovery of and access to a wealth of public scientific data.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and their partners expend significant resources to collect marine geophysical data. In order to enable scientific discovery and re-use, the data must be easily discoverable and readily accessible to numerous users and applications now and into the future. In addition, data need to be integrated across space and time. To meet these goals, NCEI draws on a variety of software technologies and strictly adheres to international data standards. The result is a geospatial framework built on spatially-enabled databases, standards-based web services, and International Standards Organization metadata. NCEI’s suite of tools and services delivers over 40TB of marine geophysical data each year to a wide range of customers. By making these data more accessible to both human and machine clients, NCEI extends the use of, and therefore the value of, these data.The result is environmental information that enables informed decisions.