Current State of the Art
Marine environmental data are today often aggregated at international joint services, for the benefit of all organisations and individuals. The EU has been very active in promoting this, under the Copernicus umbrella and with services like EMODnet and SeaDataNet. Aggregation and openness mean that well-designed methods and protocols for both data provision and extraction are absolutely essential, including machine-to-machine interfaces (APIs, Application Programming Interfaces). Experienced data professionals at traditional monitoring organisation (for example SMHI in Sweden) set up new data streams, make adjustments and amendments to existing streams, and routinely run into issues and challenges that have to be solved. The data aggregating services offer support and help functions (‘data stewardship’) for both, data suppliers and data users, and they provide education and capacity building, primarily to public agencies. The possibility of including data sources outside of dedicated national monitoring agencies, for example those from Citizen Science and from industry, have gained recent attention. Correspondingly, the EU also wants its aggregated data to be used (and provided) by a wider set of organisations and individuals, outside of the traditional realm of large national agencies and academia. However, expanding the group of data users and providers to more actors and new sectors will generate a radically expanding need for data stewardship, which is currently not available. Such data stewardship will require more than education. It will require continuous attention and support, including with nitty-gritty details such as file formatting. Such stewardship will require both competencies and time at a level that can only be expected in-house in large organisations but not in smaller organisations, incl. civil society.
C2B2 advance beyond the State of the Art
C2B2 will focus strongly on data, as expressed in our motto ‘from data to knowledge to decisions & actions’. In a quintuple helix (academia, industry, public sector, civil society, natural environment), four of the branches can be represented by people and organisations, but the natural environment can only be represented by data. C2B2 will reach its vision to a large extent by letting people from different sectors provide and use marine data, to interpret and create knowledge from marine data, and to take action they believe in. We are absolutely convinced of the transformative power of opening up this process, but at the same time we are acutely aware of the data-related challenges involved in doing so. C2B2 will facilitate marine data stewardship for all actors, including new providers and/or users of marine data. Central for this effort is our partner Swedish National Data Service (SND) together with SMHI, which is Sweden’s designated National Oceanographic Data Centre. SND and SMHI will work to set up a national structure for marine data stewardship.
Task
Activities and results
Contact persons
David Rayner
Per Bergström
