Open Service Network for Marine Environmental Data

The NETMAR project has developed a pilot European Marine Information System (EUMIS) for searching, downloading and integrating satellite, in situ and model data from ocean and coastal areas. It is a user-configurable system offering flexible service discovery, access and chaining facilities using OGC, OPeNDAP and W3C standards. It uses a semantic framework coupled with ontologies for identifying and accessing distributed data, such as near-real time, forecast and historical data. EUMIS also enables further processing of such data to generate composite products and statistics suitable for decision-making in diverse marine application domains. The figure below illustrates how observations, derived parameters and predictions are retrieved from a distributed service network through standard protocols, and delivered through the EUMIS portal using ontologies and semantic frameworks to select suitable products and where new products can be generated dynamically using chained processing services.