The Blue-Cloud project is federating distributed marine data resources, computing platforms, and analytical services to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability. In order to do so, a “Blue-Cloud technical framework” has been set-up, where leading marine data management infrastructures are federated with horizontal e-infrastructures to maximise the exploitation of data resources available from different sources.
The Blue-Cloud framework consists of two major technical components: a Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service to serve federated discovery and access to blue data infrastructures, and a Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to provide computing platforms and analytical services facilitating the collaboration between researchers.
The Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service is one of the two main components of the Blue-Cloud technical framework, next to the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE).
The Blue Cloud Data Discovery and Access service architecture is based upon a combination of the GeoDab metadata broker service of CNR-IIA, and the SeaDataNet CDI service modules as developed by MARIS, IFREMER, and EUDAT in the framework of the EU SeaDataCloud project. For the Blue-Cloud Discovery and Access service and its modules, additional developments will be needed such as adapting and upgrading existing services, adding new services, testing modules, integrating modules, and testing the integrated service, in order to achieve the planned functionality.
The overall concept is that the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service will harvest metadata from the blue data infrastructures by means of protocols such as CSW or OAI-PMH. The project is preparing a mapping per catalogue service of each blue data infrastructure to extract and harmonise individual metadata outputs to a common metadata model (ISO19115 – 19139), starting at the syntactic level.