Ocean Best Practices Workshop VIII

The eight Ocean Best Practices Workshop is taking place from the 14th to the 18th of October 2024!

The objective of the eighth Ocean Best Practices System Workshop (OBPS WSVIII) is to facilitate the cross-cutting primary role of best practices in operational oceanography by promoting dialogues across science and technology. In the era of Digital Twins for the Ocean, the need of best practices is fundamental for a more interoperable and reliable use of ocean data, for the evolution of the worldwide observing network from the deep ocean to the coast and for dealing with complex forecasting systems. The ultimate goal for satisfying this need is to provide standards and tools for developing new solutions for marine conservation, for predictions and monitoring, for a sustainable ocean environment, and a sustainable Blue Economy.

The Agenda framework has Plen​aries, scheduled on 14th and 18th October, and Workshop Sessions from 15 to 17 October. The first  Workshop  Plenary is devoted to the evolution of our Ocean knowledge and policy, and the second one addresses workshop recommendations and ​future perspectives.

Blue-Cloud 2026 at the event

Blue-Cloud 2026 presented a workshop session on the 17th of October on "Blue-Cloud Data-intensive Workbenches for selected Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs)."

This session presented to the OBPS audience the Big Data Workbenches that were being developed under the umbrella of the Blue-Cloud 2026 initiative with marine data providers such as SeaDataNet, EMODnet Chemistry, CMEMS, EcoTaxa, and more. Together, utilising best practices and standards, they worked to develop, validate, and document new analytical Big Data Workbenches, which could be adopted by EMODnet, CMEMS, and selected RIs for producing, at regular intervals, a set of harmonised and validated data collections for a selection of Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) in physics, chemistry, and biology—highly relevant for analysing the state of the environment and numerical simulations useful for deploying Digital Twins of the Ocean applications.

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The session gave a general presentation of the workflows that were being designed and implemented by ocean and data scientists from European marine infrastructures (Blue-Cloud 2026, SeaDataNet, EMODnet Chemistry, CMEMS, EcoTaxa) to deploy data-intensive Workbenches for selected Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs). Thanks to the Workbenches, researchers harmonized, validated, and qualified large and various in situ data sources, exploiting the blue analytical services available in the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment. One of the first and most important steps was to analyze and select the most useful metadata to retain between several input datasets, so that they could be compared. This semantic task improved metadata used in different communities and hopefully led to a common choice. Other elements, still under development, were also showcased and presented for community feedback, such as the semantic analyzer, the semantic brokerage and the DAB components, Beacon as a powerful data lake that enabled subsetting, and how all these elements were crucial for the Workbenches.

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Agenda

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