Extending possibilities by leveraging OPeNDAP for remotely exchanging complex oceanographic data

The Digital Infrastructure group at Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) is responsible for the development and maintenance of the organization's data management, archive and distribution. Data acquired from sensors on cabled ocean observatories off the coast of British Columbia and in the Arctic are made available via ONC's online interface to a multidisciplinary community of scientists, the public, government and non-governmental agencies. In order to better enable scientists, ONC has embarked upon an initiative to leverage the OPeNDAP-NetCDF-CF framework for interoperability that has been gaining momentum with the oceanographic and climate communities. Funded by Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network's (CANARIE) Research Platform Interface program, the Extending Possibilities by Leveraging OPeNDAP for Remotely Exchanging (ExPLORE) Complex Oceanographic Data project aims to be operational by the end of 2014. Together with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)-compliant web-services, this project will significantly extend ONC's interoperability commitment. This framework was chosen due to the maturing infrastructure for developers and end-users, increasing community support, and demand from end-users for webservices. In brief, OPeNDAP (Open source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol) includes software and a protocol for transporting data across the web. The NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) data format and associated software libraries are particularly suited to scientific data arrays. Since these files are machine-independent and self-describing, data access and sharing are streamlined. The CF (Climate and Forecast) metadata convention designed for NetCDF files specifies metadata attributes and standardizes variables (names and measurement units). Building upon existing web-services and tools, ONC will be publishing additional web-services for increased functionality such as dataset discovery, metadata browsing and data access. Training resources like documentation, sample scripts and tutorials will assist the community in adopting these tools. Initial implementation will support multi-dimensional data from instruments like Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers or mobile platforms like gliders and vertical profilers. System architecture, novel implementation aspects, customized extensions and usage will be highlighted during the presentation. It is expected that this approach will enhance the utility of ONC's extensive datasets for researchers, and facilitate interoperability with other oceanographic data providers. Researchers will benefit by being able to query ONC data from within their working environment (e.g., MATLAB, R, Python), merge ONC data with other sources more seamlessly, and share routines for processing and visualization with less effort. Data providers and portals that support these standards will be able to integrate ONC data and form collaborative partnerships.