OceanExpert | Document

Author(s)	Ben Searle, IODE Chairman
Summary	The necessity to access greater quantities of marine data to support a broad range of maritime activities has been increasing rapidly over the past few years. Larger quantities of data combined with a greater need to make existing data more accessible is making the task of the marine data manager increasingly more difficult. Today the information systems that are used to support marine data management are generally developed specifically for each individual agency. The systems are developed to support an agencies specific need and more importantly their specific data formats. This leads to inefficiencies in system development and promotes proprietary data structures further complicating data exchange and data fusion activities. The IODE community is only too aware that we have not successfully been able to standardise data formats. A lack of standard data formats complicates data exchange and also makes the fusion of multiple data sets more difficult. It also results in our inability to share software for managing or processing data. This leads to a tremendous amount of duplication of effort with data managers all around the world developing systems to undertake mostly similar functions. There is a tremendous waste of effort and cost associated with this duplication. Today the marine community is comprised of an increasing number of organisations and scientists collecting larger volumes of data for an ever-increasing number of purposes. The imperative to create national, regional and global databases is also increasing which is further highlighting the lack of an open, integrating marine data framework.
Doc Type	Working Document
Status	Published on 29 Sep 2000
Notes	Sixteenth Session of the IOC Committee on International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE), Lisbon, Portugal, 30 October – 9 November 2000
This document is in the list(s):	IODE Session Working Documents

IOC/IODE-XVI/25

Development of a Marine XML