The Ocean Tool for Public Understanding and Science (OcToPUS) is a research initiative
at the University of Oxford located at the Department of Zoology and initiated through
the Oxford Martin School Programme on Sustainable Oceans
(http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/sustainable-oceans). We aim
to support scientific study, monitoring, policy and decision-making related to the
management of the oceans.
TECHNOLOGY: OcToPUS relies on established free and open-source geospatial technology to provide
interactive access to dynamically updated, multi-dimensional data on the marine
environment. A retrospective approach to big data archives allows us to present
information on temporal trends and variability in ocean phenomena and to identify
hotspots of change in the oceans.
INPUT:
OcToPUS dynamically harvests open data from a large variety of sources
(/data#sources). Our servers are constantly being synchronized and in case new
datasets become available at any of the sources, they are being harvested,
preprocessed and ingested into the OcToPUS database and analysis engine.
Preprocessed datasets are presented with harmonized spatial and temporal
specifications and unified metadata to allow for direct usability in the analysis. Whenever
possible datasets are preprocessed "on-the-y" upon request.
All datasets are served with global extent (bounding box: -180, 180, -90, 90) using a
united coordinate reference system (WGS84), with a resampled spatial resolution of
0.09 degrees (approximately 10km), at various temporal resolutions (1 month, 1 year,
10 years, 50 years), 137 standard depth levels (if applicable) and spanning over a time
range of up to 52 years (1964 – present). Metadata are ingested into the le headers
and a unified coastline is applied to all datasets. Vector datasets are provided with an
adaptive scale-dependent coastline.