Partnership Details

National Marine Sanctuaries Program (NMS)

Since 2005, we have partnered with the National Marine Sanctuaries Program on their West Coast Observation Project. The project involves the PISCO physical oceanography and database teams, and focuses on the processing of nearshore temperature, water quality, and ocean current data from the PISCO and Sanctuary moorings along the US west coast. Participating sanctuaries include the Olympic Coast NMS, Gulf of Farallones NMS, Cordell Bank NMS, Monterey Bay NMS, and the Channel Islands NMS. Data that are collected from the moored array are loaded into the PISCO Data Catalog, and are regularly harvested by the National Coastal Data Development Center (NCDDC). After a series of conversions, the data are published to the National Oceanographic Data Center’s (NODC) public archive.

The collaboration between the Sanctuary and PISCO research staff involves tight coordination in processing the data. We have held multiple training workshops and conference calls that have brought PISCO and Sanctuary personnel together to coordinate on the following four areas:

• Creation and maintenance of XML-encoded metadata (EML) that describe the data files produced by the array of oceanographic sensors
• Uniform quality control processing of data from each sensor using standardized techniques in Matlab
• Upload of these data and metadata files to the PISCO Data Catalog using a Matlab toolbox that communicates with the PISCO Data Catalog
• Harvesting of the data and metadata files from the PISCO Data Catalog in order to produce summary graphics, FGDC-compliant documentation, and NetCDF-based binary versions of the data that are then served via OPeNDAP server software

To keep open communication among all of the parties involved, PISCO staff maintain an email list serve archive where anyone involved can post questions, propose plans, and coordinate on changes to the system. For more information, email webcontact@lists.piscoweb.org.

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)

The computing staff at NCEAS has been pushing the bounds in the area of ecological informatics since its inception, and we have worked closely with NCEAS developers on many technologies that are used today to manage disparate data from multiple disciplines. For instance, the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) was first written by NCEAS researchers, and PISCO participated in a community-driven effort to improve and extend the language so that it had broader applicability. Likewise, PISCO researchers have collaborated with NCEAS on a National Science Foundation grant that explored the automated creation of handheld user interfaces for field data collection. We continue to work with developers at NCEAS in order to improve the state of interdisciplinary environmental information management.

Specifically, computing staff at PISCO and NCEAS have collaborated on a National Science Foundation project to make strides in electronic field data collection using handheld software. Called the Jalama Project, software developers at NCEAS and PISCO built a system that would create custom field data entry forms that were derived from the detailed, machine-readable documentation found in the Ecological Metadata Language XML syntax. The software was a proof-of-concept system that used open source technologies (such as the technology behind the Mozilla Firefox browser) to alleviate the burden of ground-up, custom software development efforts for each field collection campaign. An article describing the results of the project can be found at the journal of Ecological Informatics.

Likewise, we have also been highly involved in testing and fixing the various software tools that have been produced by NCEAS and other developers through the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) project. PISCO’s Data Catalog is run using the Metacat software, a flexible XML database developed at NCEAS, and we frequently provide feedback through testing and bug fixes to the software as it matures. Using the replication feature of the Metacat software, the entire PISCO data archive is mirrored to NCEAS as part of the Ecoinformatics collaboration, and they are subsequently mirrored to the Network office of the US Long Term Ecological Research Network.

Santa Barbara Coastal Long-term Ecological Research (SBCLTER)

At UC Santa Barbara, we have had a close working relationship with the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER since we share many of the same data management challenges that stem from working with interdisciplinary data. In order to take advantage of economies of scale, we partner with the LTER on deploying and maintaining server systems that meet the needs of both research groups. Information managers at the LTER also work with us on building software systems that benefit the research community as a whole. We collaborate on data processing code used to quality-control PISCO, LTER, and NMS data, and to load those data into our shared data catalog.

Computing staff at the SBCLTER and PISCO have also contributed to the development of the Ecological Metadata Language, an XML-based data documentation syntax that accommodates both machine and human readability. We face similar challenges in managing ecological and oceanographic data, and therefore have worked together to help build common solutions. Our efforts in quality control processing of oceanographic data are also similar, and so we have worked together to build software in Matlab that can handle data collections from both groups. For more information, contact Christopher Jones or Margaret O’Brien.