Resource Catalogue and Registry

The Blue-Cloud Catalogue is more than a simple database: it’s a living inventory of interoperable resources, designed to make marine knowledge easy to find, access, integrate, and reuse.  Through the Catalogue, users can explore millions of datasets and digital services coming from Europe’s most trusted sources, all within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) framework.

One Catalogue, Many Resources

The Blue-Cloud Catalogue connects diverse marine and environmental assets under a unified, searchable interface.  Each resource is described using standardised metadata that complies with the EOSC Interoperability Framework and domain-specific vocabularies.

Users can browse and access:

  • Datasets and data products, covering ocean physics, chemistry, biology, and human activities.
  • Models and analytical tools, including scripts, workflows, and simulation results.
  • Virtual Laboratories (VLabs) that combine data and tools for specific marine domains.
  • Training and documentation materials to support open-science practices.
  • Web services and APIs that connect Blue-Cloud to other infrastructures and applications.

In this way, the Catalogue functions as both a portal for discovery and a bridge for interoperability across the marine science community.

Designed Around FAIR Principles

The Blue-Cloud Catalogue embodies the FAIR data principles — ensuring that all resources are:

  • Findable: enriched with persistent identifiers (PIDs), searchable keywords, and rich metadata for easy discovery.
  • Accessible: reachable via standard open protocols and APIs, ensuring long-term access to trusted sources.
  • Interoperable: using controlled vocabularies, ontologies, and EOSC-standard schemas to enable machine-to-machine integration.
  • Reusable: clearly licensed and documented to support replication, citation, and data-driven innovation.

Each entry in the Catalogue provides detailed metadata, access conditions, and information about provenance and versioning — ensuring that users can trust and reuse marine data in their own research.

Connecting People, Data, and Services

The Catalogue is fully integrated into the User Space (Gateway), allowing users not only to find data but also to use it immediately within the Virtual Research Environment (VRE).

Once logged in, users can publish their own data, workflows, and results back to the Catalogue. This transforms the Catalogue into an active research hub, where data flows seamlessly between discovery, analysis, and publication.

Supporting the EOSC Federation

The Blue-Cloud Catalogue is a federated resource aligned with the EOSC Federation Handbook. It interacts with the EOSC Resource Catalogue by publishing and maintaining metadata according to EOSC requirements. Through this interoperability layer, Blue-Cloud’s marine datasets and services become discoverable by the entire EOSC user community, contributing to Europe’s shared open-science infrastructure.

This ensures:

  • Metadata harmonisation across domains and infrastructures.
  • Sustainable integration of marine services into the wider EOSC ecosystem.
  • Visibility and reusability of marine resources beyond the ocean community.