In Geo-Seas there are 26 marine geological and geophysical data centres, located in 17 European maritime countries. These 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 has been 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 (CDI) service, that gives users a highly detailed insight of the availability and geographical spreading of marine data across the European data centres. The CDI service provides an ISO19115-based index (metadatabase) to individual data sets (such as samples, time series, profiles, trajectories, etc) and a unique interface to online data access. The CDI service is a component of the SeaDataNet infrastructure and its development and maintenance are governed by the SeaDataNet Technical Task Group (TTG). The Geo-Seas development team has adopted the CDI service and adapted several components (metadata format, vocabularies, list of supported data formats) for making these better fit for the purpose of handling also geological and geophysical data sets. This has been done in cooperation with SeaDataNet TTG and has resulted in an upgraded CDI service that has been adopted by SeaDataNet as well.
All 26 Geo-Seas data centres are fully operational delivering data directly through the Geo-Seas discovery and access service. As a result there are now in excess of 140,000 metadata records and corresponding data sets available via the Geo-Seas portal.