While there is clearly a wealth of digital and analog data from the oceans to facilitate interdisciplinary studies, the diversity, volume, and complexity of these data sets makes it extremely difficult to efficiently and intelligently transform the data into information, and further to synthesize knowledge from studies over large geographic areas. Presented is a brief overview of four projects in progress that seek to promote the interoperability of data and software to, in turn, facilitate the leap from scientific data access to knowledge discovery.
The projects range in their focus from a system with simple access to metadata and data, as well as linkages between disparate data sets ("data to data", the Oregon Coastal Atlas and Virtual Oregon),
to a standard object-oriented data model for the structure of databases,
with "rules" for behavior and placeholders for analytical functions (ArcGIS
Marine Data Model), to a complex collaboratory/computational environment
(consisting of web mapping, relational database management, and analytic tool composition by the user) that facilitates refinement of numerical simulations, quantitative evaluation of scientific hypotheses, and exploration of new relationships between observables ("data to interpretation", the Virtual Research Vessel).
0910 Data processing
3094 Instruments and techniques
4294 Instruments and techniques
Ocean Sciences [OS]
Special Session: Data Integration, Publication, and Archival (DIPA) I