The course comprises a series of presentations, demonstrations and check-point reviews, with a large practical element to help users become familiar with: 

• Why data management is important and how it can and arguably should be part of an organisations business management framework alongside quality, occupational health and safety, and information security, all of which are covered by ISO accreditation. 

• The role of a data policy and management plan, and things to consider and how data can be shared, published and re-used. 

• Data management principles, standards and components, including data lifecycle and quality, the role of vocabularies (or data dictionaries) and the importance of creating, maintaining and publishing metadata. 

• The resources and other benefits of MEDIN and practical instruction in the use of the MEDIN data guidelines, metadata standard and controlled vocabularies.   

The course demonstrates how data management ‘best practice’ can improve organisational efficiency in data acquisition, analysis, curation and sharing. It covers data use with respect to corporate risk, re-use, audit and traceability, whilst at the same time helping minimising costs. 

The course will equip attendees to better meet the challenge of keeping on top of the ever increasing volumes and types of data that is being created and how to manage this data and make it available to users as meaningful information, whether using proprietary or open source software and systems as enablers. 

The Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) is a partnership of UK organisations committed to improving access to marine data. MEDIN is open to all with an interest in marine data and information. MEDIN is funded by a consortium of 15 sponsors and has over 50 partners that represent government departments and agencies, research organisations and private companies committed to practise good data management. MEDIN reports to the UK Marine Science Coordination Committee. 

Aims & Objectives:

The course aims to give participants a broad understanding of data governance, management principles and system components and how data can be published information and re-used with a focus on the tools that the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) provide as examples of best practice. 

Expected Learning Outcomes

• An understanding of MEDIN and why data management is important and how it can reduce costs, risk, add value through extending its original purpose.  

• An understanding of the fundamentals of how data is collected, managed, published and used plus how important metadata is!  

• An appreciation of data management components based on the International Data Management Association Book of Knowledge (DM-BOK) 

• Knowledge of the importance of metadata and practical guidance in its creation, maintenance and dissemination   

• Have an appreciation of the need to use words, phrases and terms to describe or explain marine data content and to understand how controlled vocabularies are used within the MEDIN standard and guidelines  

• Appreciate how geospatial data can be accurately represented  

• Understand the role and value of adopting data governance and how this relates to business management and corporate governance. 

• Understand what discovery metadata is, what the MEDIN discovery metadata standard is and how it is used on the MEDIN portal.   

• Be able to use the online metadata editor and metadata maestro to create MEDIN compliant discovery metadata records.  

• Understand the ways in which data is now published and considerations associated with sharing and re-use 

• Appreciate that the MEDIN data guidelines are a tool to create consistent datasets with comprehensive metadata, that allows data to be shared, understood and reused by others with ease. 

Target audience and prerequisites