Expanding accessible temporal, taxonomic and spatial extents of marine biological data through data rescue

The Coastal and Ocean Information Network Atlantic (COINAtlantic) in partnership with researchers in Atlantic Canada over three years worked to discover, document, process and disseminate marine biological data using Ocean... [ view full abstract ]

The Coastal and Ocean Information Network Atlantic (COINAtlantic) in partnership with researchers in Atlantic Canada over three years worked to discover, document, process and disseminate marine biological data using Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), and COINAtlantic processes, products and services.

Two reports have been published: State of Accessibility of Marine Biological Data in Atlantic Canada, Guidelines for Data Rescue Projects, and An Investigation of the Efficacy of Using Data from OBIS to Support State of the Environment Indicators. COINAtlantic has identified and inventoried over 300 datasets eligible for data rescue with OBIS from paper journal articles and reports. Standard metadata and processing to meet the Darwin Core standard format has been developed for a subset of these allowing the addition to OBIS.

COINAtlantic has developed applications to generate Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compatible online mapping services for the OBIS Canada Information Publication Tool (IPT) data. The Sydney Harbour Atlas and a Sydney Harbour ‘story map’ demonstrate aggregating data from multiple internet sources. Finally the project tested a one day training course for early career researchers with the objective of developing expertise for the students to routinely depositing research data for dissemination to other researchers through OBIS.

In the future COINAtlantic would like to continue this work, including the following projects: expert succession planning, student training for OBIS data management, developing online training materials, upgrading the COINAtlantic tool set, and developing new tools to expedite the transfer of data to OBIS from organizational internal databases.