MarBlog

The Marine Environmental Data & Information Network has been on the scene for quite a few years now.

I have been involved through my work, and attended the recent open partnership meeting, and it struck me that the recent move into an “operational phase” seems to have kickstarted a great leap forward. There were many more organisations present at the partnership meeting than I think has previously been there. Crucially, there is a mix of public bodies (including NDPB’s) and private companies now, and this is important as MEDIN is aiming to embed itself early into contractual agreements for the collection of Marine Data.

By embedding itself, I mean that MEDIN supplied a number of functions and standards that are useful for partners to include in data collection contracts. By including these, the contractor takes on an obligation to include metadata in relevant format, and to stick to standards for certain types of data.

The process for including and utilising MEDIN is that there are several Data Archive Centres (DAC’s) which store data long term and make it available, initially through MEDIN’s discovery portal, but also with view and download services planned for many areas. While there may be costs associated with committing large data sets to an archive centre, there are actually a number of great benefits, which I think are not fully realised by partners or data suppliers:

• Data are stored securely and handled by experts.
• Data are made public (if so agreed)
• The partner does not incur the costs of storing, backing up and maintaining Master Data Management aspects of these data sets
• Partners bandwidth costs are not escalated by starting to publish data.
• Data becomes part of a UK wide network of reporting data

As the deadlines for the first batches of INSPIRE Annex I metadata is approaching in December,  people are waking up to the work ahead. The UK Location Programme has been working hard at developing solutions, and preparing information for anyone needing to meet the INSPIRE directive in making spatial data available and accessible.

The latest culmination was a Data Providers workshop, where a set of presentations laid out what will be expected in terms of delivering data, and what tools are going to be made available to help thise work. The presentations are now online, and I’d recommend anyone finding themselves having to publish spatial data under INSPIRE to have a look at these – they are a great introduction to the broad concepts, while there is also a good amount of detail for the more technically minded – helping to make decisions on the use of these tools or other services.