National research infrastructure Norwegian Marine Data Centre
Original (non-English) name
Norsk Marint Datasenter
Acronym
NMDC
Citation
Abstract
The Norwegian national infrastructure for marine data that will deliver seamless access to documented marine data sets over important sea areas for Norway to the marine research world. Norway lacks an integrated system for the exchange of marine data between institutions, which hinders operational, efficient and innovative marine research. Access to large amounts of high-quality research data, including long time series, will lay the foundation for good research and make Norwegian institutions attractive partners in international research programs - an area where Norway has long traditions.
The Institute of Marine Research will host the core of the project and facilitate the transmission of data for many of the partners. Other partners have their own storage facilities and functions that will be nodes in a distributed infrastructure. The core of the system shall contain “storage facilities and software that provide efficient access to metadata and a large number of datasets. The user gets access to metadata and datasets from all partners through a common web input with maps and graphics that will make it intuitive to search, select and retrieve data. The system will be designed to support different users by creating typical "cases" that show how to search for data. Access to the respective data sets must go through the web application to get a "one-stop-shop" for the data. Each node (data owner with its own storage) in the system must establish program components that make it possible to find data on request through the core system. Users can export data in many common formats that are commonly used in the research world (eg excel, txt, shape (?), NetCDF). The system shall also handle matters related to requirements for current licenses for different data sets and it shall have a register of all requests for data.