Further Enhancements of the Geospatial Interface to the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management System

The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) was created to serve scientific investigators funded by the National Science Foundation’s Biological and Chemical Oceanography Sections as a location where marine biogeochemical, ecological and oceanographic data and information developed in the course of scientific research can easily be stored, disseminated, and protected, on short and intermediate time-frames. Our main objective is to support the scientific community through improved accessibility to ocean science data. The BCO-DMO manages existing and new data sets from individual scientific investigators and collaborative groups of investigators, and makes these available via any standard Web browser. This presentation addresses the current status of our implementation of the University of Minnesota’s OGC-compliant MapServer interface to these data. Recently added features or changes include additional mapping and display options, metadata search options, and support for KML (Google Earth) output files. We have made additions to the metadata database to support these and other changes and to enhance our interoperability features. Development of the MapServer interface to the BCO-DMO data collection provides a geospatial context in which to discover data sets that are of potential interest.