3. Restrictions on Data Framework Development
With all the advances in information technology, why is the management of marine data still such a difficult task. Why is it that data managers are still struggling to manage data effectively within an organisation, let alone within a country or region? The idea that data can be exchanged and made available to others with the same ease that Emails are transmitted on the World Wide Web is still not possible using the present approach. The methods that are used today makes merging datasets into global databases an enormous task requiring considerable human and computing resources.
Even though very sophisticated computing technology is available; purpose built marine data management systems can not be purchased. Many other industries can do this and the large number of suppliers of accounting, human resource, or stock control computer systems indicates the broad availability of these types of applications. The closest the marine sector comes to this is the electronic nautical chart; a computer based system that supports safety at sea through electronic navigation functions. There are also a number of very specialised software systems available as part of an oceanographic instrument package, but these generally support the visualisation and processing of a single instrument or data type and cannot be considered data management systems.
Marine data managers do not have the luxury of buying a marine data specific version of ORACLE or a marine ArcView. These products or ones like them simply do not exist. Why are there no ‘off-the-shelf’ marine data systems?
There are two main reasons for why off-the-shelf marine data management systems are not available. The first is that the marine data management market is not widely recognised as a large market, although it is an area that is growing. The software industry perceives that there are more financially rewarding markets for their industry to support and this leads to a lack of interest in developing products for the marine sector.
Secondly, and more significantly, the marine community has no standards or supporting frameworks on which software developers can easily build applications. Each marine data application is developed from the beginning. Data formats are developed and the applications built to support those formats. There are no widely used formats or common data structures. There is no marine data framework available to software developers to support the creation of generic systems that are needed for economies of scale purposes. There have been many efforts made to develop data formats and data frameworks but these have never been widely adopted.
4. Our Future Challenge
It is the responsibility of data managers to develop such a framework on which software developers and data centres can build marine specific data applications. IODE needs to take a lead role in this process since this is the Committee that represents intergovernmental marine data interests.
To build such a framework, IODE must develop rules and procedures that support the sharing, integration and exchange of the multitude of marine data types that exist in laboratories and data centres. Past attempts at creating such a framework have been based on developing a data exchange format and this has had limited success. There are many reasons for this, but the most common is that data centres have invested substantial amounts of funds in developing their systems and are unwilling or cannot afford to change to another format simply because it is the agreed standard.
