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

In rural Scotland, it’s the time where harvesters starts being a common image on the fields. But I am setting up for a different kind of harvest – the harvesting of my organisation’s metadata.

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