WHOI and SIO (II): Next Steps toward Multi-Institution Archiving of Shipboard and Deep Submergence Vehicle Data

This paper presents technical aspects of its sibling paper which describes the scientific aspects of the joint Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) project to build common interfaces between their data applications. This work results in a federated digital library containing selected contents of WHOI and SIO ocean-going platforms. The digital library open-architecture employed by SDSC-built CruiseViewer software provides general-purpose data and metadata harvesting methods and external interfaces to a variety of client applications. We show how interfaces between it and the WHOI-built Shipboard DataGrabber, WHOI Cruises and Jason Virtual Control Van software increases the analytical capabilities of these tools. Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications such as ArcGIS, Fledermaus, INTviewer, Geoframe as well as widely-used, open-source systems such as Grass, GMT, and MB-System are also being integrated. To facilitate the development of software interfaces between our applications and the federated digital library, we have servers at both WHOI and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to comprise the hardware backbone of the data network. These low-cost servers provide the computation and data storage to enable each institution to independently manage and harvest data from their respective research platforms and making this widely diverse data searchable and retrievable by a wide range of client software. We are jointly developing common and insitutionally-unique metadata to accommodate our respective needs and working with the Marine Metadata Initiative (MMI) to incorporate their work, incorporate our work into their effort, and feed our experiences to this group.