Panel Discussion

1
Panel Discussion
C. Maillard IFREMER/SISMERNODC of France

• The Colour of Ocean Data - The Palais des
  Congrès, Brussels, Belgium, 25-27 November 2002

2
DC1 Role of the data Centres in managing data
from the global science programs

• to offer a perennial and high technology level
  infrastructure and professional staff to
  contribute to the project data management
  structure
• to disseminate the existing international
  standards and expertises as a minimum basic
  requirement for data management, especially for
  the meta-data and the quality control assesments
• to provide standardized complementary data sets
  to the projects

3
DC2 Challenges that the data centres need to
face individually and collectively

• to be professional and operational to insure
  that all the data are
• safely archived
• checked for quality
• timely processed and delivered
• diseminated by internet and other adapted
  communication systems
• to return products to the data providers and the
  other users
• integrated observations data sets from various
  sources
• value added synthetic products
• contributions to scientific papers
• to convince the data collectors and the
  supporting agencies that is is valuable to spend
  a low percentage of the overall cost of the data
  collection for the archiving

4
DC3 What added value comes from managing data in
data centres?

• providing a perennial archiving system able to
  cope with the changes in the media technology
• insuring that the data documentation is in
  accordance to the international standards and the
  data organization not person dependant
• avoiding the dispersion of the data in hundreds
  of laboratories or scientific teams with
  different data management methodologies
• assembling long time series of data of the same
  type
• providing timely access to data through dedicated
  to data servicing teams
• optimizing the costs and manpower

5
ALL1 What to do to reduce the impacts of
technological differencies betwen devloping and
developed countries?

• to insure the participation of both D/-D
  Countries in the developement of common databases
• the data policy should insure a wide data
  circulation
• the developing countries should also contribute
  to the international effort
• the job training on practical issues should
  enhance the mutual sharing of expertise

• to insure one WWW link to all that is possible,
  at least with limited speed

• to insure also the dissemination of large data
  sets by other adapted media than WWW

6
ALL 2 Differences between data management
practices between biological and physical
oceanographers?

• More complicated data sets in biology
• a 5th dimension with the taxonomy
• necessity of linking environmental parameters,
  bio-chemistry and biological observations in
  different compartments water column, SPM,
  sediment, biota ..
• Less practises of data exchange and computer
  technology among the biologists, including the
  documentation of the coordinates
• The bio observations are frequently too
  dependent on the measurement technology to be
  intercomparable

7
ALL3 three wishes

• a common work on the standards for various
  parameters, not only for temperature and salinity
• a better acknowledgement of the data submission
  from the experimentators the submission of a
  data set that pass the QC at a data centre should
  be recognized as a  rank A  publication
• a better public awareness of the data legacy and
  the  data librarian duty   how to follow the
  climate change without long time series of good
  data?