SESAME IP
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Introduction into SESAME Data Management      
 
     Information management is essential for the achievement of all objectives of the SESAME project . Assessment of changes in the Southern European Seas (SES) ecosystems over the last 50 year requires collecting relevant, historical, multidisciplinary observations and providing ready access to data in a timely manner for SESAME partners. Assessment of current status of the SES ecosystem requires the development of protocols and tools supporting fast data flow from data providers to researchers.

      Prediction of changes in the SES ecosystems requires the organizing and processing of huge amount of data which will be generated by mathematical models. Organization of the data management system within the first 1.5 years of the project appears to be crucial for assimilation of multidisciplinary data in order to extract essential processes and estimate significant changes in key parameters of ecosystems. While giving the SESAME objectives first priority, data management has to satisfy existing international oceanographic standards in order to provide SESAME data to the wide scientific community.
 
        The bulk of historical oceanographic observations in the SES has already been accumulated as a result of international efforts in oceanographic data management during the last twenty years. Part of the data is available as published CD-ROMs:
  •  MEDAR-MEDATLASII
  • MATER

    • Other part can be downloaded from databases via on-line interfaces:
  • WOD05
  • CORIOLIS
  • ICES
  • WDC-MARE
    		•
         The organization of data in the sources listed above is generally oriented at long term archiving and free distribution of oceanographic data. Nevertheless a ready access to the data in a timely manner remains a considerable problem for users who do not take part in data management professionally. Data from different sources has different formats and quality assessment, therefore unification of relevant datasets appears to be complicated and time consuming.
        To improve the data access for researchers, the following data management strategy is being implemented:
    1. Scan public available data sources in order to accumulate all SESAME relevant data which were digitized and archived before SESAME .
    2. Provide assistance and tools to SESAME partners in order to uniform the digitizing of historical, newly observed and model generated data sets during the SESAME project.
    3. Convert all SESAME relevant datasets into mobile databases with oceanographic oriented user interface.
    4. Provide on-line information interface to the SESAME databases.
          Based on recommendations of SEADATANET project, two widely used formats were accepted for exchange of physical and chemical cast data: MEDATLAS and ODV . The EUR-OCEANS format was accepted as a generic format for biological cast data. Information regarding preparation of data in the acceptable formats can be found on the SESAME accepted oceanographic data formats page. Submissions of datasets by data providers is being carried out through the data submission page Due to different principles of data acquisition and analysis, all data will be organized into three different databases:

         (i) physical and chemical cruise data (episodic stations);
         ii) physical and chemical data from permanent stations (time-series);
         (iii) biological cruise and permanent station data (episodic stations and time-series).

         Datasets generated by mathematical models in full volume are stored by modelers. For dissemination via SESAME data portal, only time-series of major ecological parameters from representative regions will be selected and loaded into the permanent stations database. As a basic database system, the MS ACCESS system was adopted for all mobile SESAME databases. Mobile databases will support parameter definition according to SEADATANET vocabularies. An oceanographic user interface will be developed to allow data visualization and quality control. Additional option is to export data from databases to ODV generic format and use ODV for data analysis. For the online interface, physical and chemical mobile databases will be converted to a MS SQL Server system. Biological data will be loaded separately to the WDC-MARE database.