The Western Channel Observatory (WCO) is an oceanographic time-series and marine biodiversity reference site that provides a valuable source of data to a wide range of UK research, policymaker, public and businesses communities. Recently emerging sensor and platform technologies have proven their abilities to increase both the spatial and time resolution of these data. While this additional data will allow current applications to evolve and improve their capabilities, a new generation of innovative digital solutions such as digital twins or higher level artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications require the creation of new, scalable, robust and mature data pipelines that focus on the need to make data truly findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).
This Constructing Digital Environment (CDE) mini-demonstrator project has allowed the WCO team to collaborate with data providers, data users and data archiving centres to identify, investigate and trial approaches to increase the FAIR-ness of marine observation data. Focussing on the observatory’s L4 CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) data, the project has developed a range of intuitive data visualisation and exploration tools that seamlessly access PML and BODC datasets.
In the addition to the toolsets that are now available to support the public exploration of the WCO’s CTD data (here…) the project released a reusable Reference Architecture that documents the project’s design approach and provides a valuable resource to guide the development of the CDE communities’ other FAIR near real-time marine environmental datasets.
Keywords: FAIR; Data and data management; Metadata; Marine; Visualisation