In order to explore ways for better Integration of EU and North American data for the Atlantic Ocean, AtlantOS WP7 organized a 2-day international workshop in Brussels on June 7-8, 2017. As AtlantOS has established collaborations with organizations around the entire Atlantic Ocean, we expanded the international outlook to also include South America and Africa in order to better cover the South Atlantic Ocean. The workshop had representation from all bordering continents, and provided an overview of the Atlantic Ocean data landscape identifying key-organizations working with Atlantic Ocean data. Current impediments of transcontinental data exchange and readiness to share data on each continent were discussed from a technical as well as a political viewpoint. Most importantly the workshop established personal contacts among people from different continents, which made the grounds for new collaborations, some which are initiated under AtlantOS.

Recommendations

The data land-scape exploration exercise performed at the workshop revealed that Europe and North America possess advanced infrastructures for the collection, archiving and dissemination of Atlantic Ocean data. In Africa, Ocean data collection, archiving and dissemination are established for the Southern part of Africa but is lacking in Northern Africa. In South America, there are multiple organizations concerned with collecting, archiving and disseminating data. However, open data sharing has not gained a wider acceptance.

The workshop discussions identified that improved transcontinental interoperability can be expanded by including best practices and metadata standards for QA/QC procedures, as well as by improving communication on existing standards and best practices for data and information exchange. Transcontinental harmonization of QA/QC–best practices is an obvious next step for a better interoperability on Atlantic Ocean data. This shall include standardization of metadata for selected variables improving data traceability (starting with platforms, ships and people). An initial step for introducing best practices could be to standardize the concept of uncertainty among data providers. This shall ensure that uncertainty estimates provided by data providers are in compliance with ratified standards. In regard to QC procedures; there is an obvious need to seek interoperable solutions for QC flagging. A future task shall be to identify mapping schemes, which can integrate commonly used flagging systems. This shall include analysis of existing flagging schemes, developing and managing mappings between them, and making this data available in a machine readable form.

Further international activities

Three topics were identified during the workshop as key areas where improved transatlantic collaboration could have a significant impact on data integration:

1. Ocean data - Quality assurance and quality control

2. Data standardization

3. Interoperability, semantics and machine learning from a user community perspective including new services that could emerge from big data technologies

Key persons were assigned with the task of establishing working groups to explore these topics and to produce inputs for AtlantOS blueprint and for white papers to be presented at the OceanObs’19- conference. Altogether 3 abstracts have been submitted to OceanObs’19-conference, which has ties to the discussion at the harmonization workshop were produced in truly international collaboration and with large number of the workshop participants as co-authors. In this way, AtlantOS WP7 has initiated discussions and collaborations on Atlantic Ocean Data Integration, which may extend long into the future.