Data integration and standards at IOC of UNESCO

Edward Vanden Berghe

The organisation

• UNESCO• Intergovernmental Oceanographic

Commission (IOC)• International Oceanographic Data and

Information Exchange (IODE)• Ocean Biogeographic Information

System (OBIS)– Used to be Census of Marine Life– Now IOC under IODE

Networks

• Both IODE and OBIS are global networks

• Main product is data warehouse• Standards of critical importance

– Standards for formats– Standards for content (‘vocabs’)

• Single standard is an illusion– Limited set of standards– Crosswalks between them

International partners

• World Meteorological Organisation– Together JCOMM

• EU– SeaDataNet

• GEO, GOOS, GEO BON– Global observing systems

Standards development

• Several working groups and projects– Metadata

• Based on ISO-19115

– JCOMM• Together with WMO

– Ocean Data Portal• Together with SeaDataNet

– OBIS• Together with GBIF/TDWG

Example: OBIS

• Network of 15 Regional OBIS Nodes, 5 Thematic OBIS Nodes

• All contributing data

• RONs and TONs are aggregators in their own right

• Total of nearly 30M records, from 870 individual data sets

• Integration on a large scale

Example: OBIS standards

• Biogeography: GBIF/TDWG– Darwin Core, Extended to OBIS Schema– ABCD

• Metadata: discovery metadata– Global Change Master Directory – NASA– MEDI – IODE; FGDC – US Gov?

• Taxonomy: World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) – Contribution to Species 2000 and Catalogue of

Life• Geography

– Polygon sets• EEZs, FAO areas, IHO…

– Gazetteer

OBIS standard output

• CSV and KML• OGC Services

– WMS and WFS– Already consumed by others

• Digital Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR)

• REST in preparation

• Empower others to use OBIS data

Biology requires more documentation• Taxonomy (‘species’) is an extra

dimension– Taxonomic names are often misspelled

• Many different ways of measuring things– Weight of a jellyfish?

• Species identification labour-intensive and specialists’ work– But automated systems are starting to

appear

Thanks

• www.iobis.org

• team@iobis.org, evberghe@iobis.org