Data access
The Geo-Seas infrastructure will link 26 marine geological and geophysical data centres, located in 17 European maritime countries. The data centres manage large sets of marine geological and geophysical data, originating from their own institutes and from other parties in their countries, in a variety of data management systems and configurations. A major objective and challenge in Geo-Seas is to provide an integrated and harmonised overview and access to these data resources, using a distributed network approach.This is achieved by implementing the Common Data Index service, that gives users a highly detailed insight of the availability and geographical spreading of marine data across the European data centres. The CDI provides an ISO19115-based index (metadatabase) to individual data sets (such as samples, time series, profiles, trajectories, etc) and it provides a unique interface to online data access. The CDI service is adopted from the SeaDataNet infrastructure, that is responsible for the initial development and further maintenance of the CDI service and its format, tools, vocabularies and protocols. Recently the CDI service has been upgraded in a cooperation between Geo-Seas and SeaDataNet.