SeaDataNet

Marine Environment

About

SeaDataNet is a major pan-European infrastructure for managing, indexing and providing access to marine data sets and data products, acquired by European organisations from research cruises and other observational activities in European coastal marine waters, regional seas and the global ocean. SeaDataNet has been initiated and is managed and operated by the National Oceanographic Data Centres in Europe.

Type & number of data sets

The CDI service is a SeaDataNet core service and it provides online unified discovery and access to vast resources of data sets, managed by > 110 connected SeaDataNet data centres from 34 countries around European seas. Currently it gives access to more than 2.8 Million data sets, originating from more than 850 organisations in Europe, covering physical, geological, chemical, biological and geophysical data, and acquired in European waters and global oceans.

Core Services

A core SeaDataNet service is the Common Data Index (CDI) data discovery and access service which provides harmonized discovery and access to a large volume of marine and ocean data sets, both from research and monitoring organisations, which increasingly are major input for developing added-value services and products that serve users from government, research and industry.

The online CDI User Interface gives users powerful search options and a highly detailed insight in the availability and geographical spreading of marine data sets, that are managed by the connected data centres. The User Interface includes functions for requesting access, and if granted, for downloading data sets from all connected data centres.

SeaDataNet operates the CDI data discovery and access service. For exchange to the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service it features an INSPIRE compliant API at aggregate metadata level and  a data access API with Marine-ID authentication, capable of processing data requests at the aggregate metadata level.
Main operators are: MARIS, IFREMER, BODC, HCMR, and EUDAT members (CSC, CINECA, GRNET, DKRZ, and STFC). Data Providers: currently >110 data centres consisting of NODCs, marine research institutes, hydrographic surveys, geological institutes, environmental monitoring agencies, international organisations, and some industry.

Function in Blue-Cloud

SeaDataNet is one of the Blue Data Infrastructures, federated in the Blue-Cloud DD&AS, and serves as one of the pillars of the initial Blue-Cloud framework. Furthermore, use is made of the experiences and system components as developed by SeaDataNet for the upgraded CDI data discovery and access service.