MarBlog

My background is in zooplankton ecology before walking down the data management route. As such i still keep an eye on things in this area, and the recent report from the ICES Study Group on Integrated Morphological Taxonomy (SGIMT) has released their report, wherein the recommendation is put forward to standardise marine taxnonomic nomenclature. No big surprises there – it is an area that we’re all too familiar with – there are lots of areas where things should be controlled better – but you have inherited a system with 10,000 old versions of names and there is neitehr the time nor the money to update it all.

However, the World Register of Marine Species (WORMS) include a Taxon Match facility, which will match up your list of species names with the authorative list and provide you with additional reference information, including ITIS codes (TSN), Aphia ID, authorities, Kindum, phyla etc. which gives you a good chance of restruturing and updating older lists which may have drifted. I tried it out on a list of approximately 7,000 species of phyto- and zoo-plankton (although you have to break it down into chuks of maximum 1500 records in a single match), and generally got about 60-70% match. It’s pretty nice to have clear up nearly 5,000 records for an hours work rather than a long and painful serach of each individual line.

Yet another TED Talk plugged! This time it is a slightly longer talk around the concepts of visualising large amounts of data in a manner that enhances understand – or information design for short.

The talk  is by David McCandless, data journalist showcases different aspects of visualising multiple data sets in a single info-graphic. Refreshingly, he also talks about caveats in the ways of aggregating and considering the visual data – essentially encouraging a critical sense in both the journalist fields creating such info graphics, and raising awareness in the consumer at the same time.

There is little doubt that complex tasks of aggregated, and visualising larger and larger data sets in an area of increasing attention – and it is nice to see some of the potential output – even if it does not focus on marine data

OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System), originally established under Census of Marine Life is animpressive alliance of people working to make biogeographic data available. As a whole, they now hold well over 27 million records and 849 data sets, which are accessible through the portal.

However, I thought I’d like to highlight a particular aspect – the OBIS Seamap. It includes observations on marine mammals, seabirds and sea turtles, as well as accessing environmental variables. In addition, there are links to a wide range of tools and additional databases ranging from photographic fin matching to sea turtle nesting sites.

However, it is the functionality of this site that is really impressive. Beyond the ability to search through over 2 million observations by data set, species, locations etc etc. you are also able to extract all the relevant information directly to freely available mapping tools such as google earth (export a kml file to work on, based on your search results) as well as OGC compliant formats for web mapping or file services. Altogether, the strong presentation of data sets combined with a well laid out and thought out set of functionalities demonstrates a very competent site, which will hopefully serve as inspiration to others looking to publish large volumes of marine data online.

It would seem jsut about every conceivable part of the web, and associated technology has been declared dead according to the collection over at Technologizer

I guess working with data management – it is something that we’re used to. Large Projects are declared dead before they hit the streets and the tech is outdated before the final user acceptance testing has rolled through. But obviously, in spite of various obituaries of web and projects – things still chug along.

Yes it happens from time to time! This article written by Jim Harris has it all – Dilbert, Data Quality, Rabbits and #FollowFriday – worth a read if you need to remind yourself of that all important Oscar Wilde quote: “Life is too important to be taken seriously”

Below is a really interesting TED talk about how we imagine ourselves being very global on account of the internet. Yet at the same time, it turns out that we primarily read local pages, and talk to our local friends through the internet – so hardly the barrier breaking and culture levelling experience forecasted for the internet. Still – its a work in progress, and I’d recommend that you watch the video – it’s an interesting talk!

It also made me think in data contexts. We use and submit data to the systems we know, and they often tend to have strong regional foci. There are obvious reasons for pooling data from particular regions, and there are also much more global databases out there-  but it still require you to know about the sources. Like Ethan Zuckerman talks about for social media in the video, perhaps we also need bridge figures in scientific data online to open up our awareness of global data. Let’s all become those data xenophiles

The united Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) runs a portal called GISFish, that provides a range of useful links to both data and literature in the field of geo-referenced information for the analysis of Fisheries and Aquaculture data. There is more information available for Aquaculture than marine fisheries at the moment, but there are still a couple of hundred links.

Note that far from everything are actual data sources, but material relating to the topics in the forms of papers, websites etc.

For people looking for background literature and information relevant to spatial analysis in fisheries, it is a useful resource.