Open Service Network for Marine Environmental Data

Today, numerous information systems and services are developed to search, browse and download marine data, such as

• Satellite and aircraft images
• Human observations from vessels, helicopters and in the field
• In situ measurements from buoys, instruments mounted on vessels and land-based stations
• Forecasts from weather, metocean, ecosystem and drift models.

However, these systems are not fully interoperable, and do not allow users to view, access, process, and analyse data from different providers without further processing. Current systems are typically based on custom-built or proprietary software. Thus, users need tools of their own to read and extract (1), reformat (2) and reproject (3) relevant parts of the retrieved datasets, before being able to visualise and analyse them together. This is time consuming and improving interoperability between marine data systems is therefore needed for more efficient data usage.