ALBERT

Description: The publication and dissemination of best practices in ocean observing is pivotal for multiple aspects of modern marine science, including cross-disciplinary interoperability, improved reproducibility of observations and analyses, and training of new practitioners. Often, best practices are not published in a scientific journal and may not even be formally documented, residing solely within the minds of individuals who pass the information along through direct instruction. Naturally, documenting best practices is essential to accelerate high-quality marine science; however, documentation in a drawer has little impact. To enhance the application and development of best practices, we must leverage contemporary document handling technologies to make best practices discoverable, accessible, and interlinked, echoing the logic of the FAIR data principles [1].

Description: Climate change and sustainable use of natural capital demand increased collaboration across the sciences. The first steps for effective collaboration often focus on improving interoperability between observation and analyses methodologies. This is traditionally done through a combination of standards and best practices. The ocean observation community and observing infrastructures - with regionally diverse members working in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering - is looking toward a dynamic consensus-building approach to match the rapid pace of technological evolution. This is an essential part of the long-term cooperation among ocean observing infrastructures. In the last 12 months, the ocean observing community has implemented an Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). This System was recently adopted by the Intergovernmental Ocean Commission as an international project under GOOS and IODE. The System consists of a permanent OBPS repository hosted by IODE with state-of-the-art semantic discovery and metadata indexing for improved access to best practices and, eventually, to the data associated with them. There have been discussions to understand how to deal with differing best practices and standards on the same observation or analyses objective and other issues that arise from a comprehensive ocean best practices system. A recent survey, to be described, offers options on alternative approaches. Further, we have created a forum, in “Frontiers in Marine Science” for discussion of best practices and their applications. This presentation will cover options for evolving and sustaining ocean best practices across infrastructures. The recommendations build upon the community survey, the OGC experience, the outcomes of the OceanObs’19 conference as well as inputs from the Decade for Ocean Sciences community meetings. The extension of this work to other communities will also be examined.

Description: The development and deployment of best practices are playing increasingly important roles in supporting ocean observing. By their nature, well-adopted and reviewed best practices facilitate interoperability, reproducibility and enhance the quality of data and information products. To be effective, best practices must be easy to discover, access and adopt. Unfortunately, a wealth of best practices is undigitized, buried in local repositories or scattered on the web. To reduce this fragmentation and to help meet the urgent and existential global challenges rapidly approaching (see, for example, UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development), the IOC-UNESCO Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS) has been created. The OBPS was recently described from an ocean research perspective [1]. In this paper, we describe the system's underlying technology and its core mission to enable content discovery and management through fine-scale indexing via text-mining and ontology-based semantic search tools. This relies on the reuse of well-adopted community thesauri and ontologies linking knowledge across the marine domain, through to the Sustainable Development Goals. We have implemented a constellation of software modules around the core OBPS repository (OBPS-R) to create a new, powerful, and extensible resource to accelerate best practice co-development, discovery, and access through intuitive user interfaces. While the system is operational, there are still many areas where further development can enhance the support of ocean observing. We address these in this paper and we invite the broader community to contribute to our common mission's open source codebase as well as creating and contributing ocean best practices to the OBPS.

Description: The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into “Ocean Best Practices.” While many groups have created best practices, they are scattered across the Web or buried in local repositories and many have yet to be digitized. To reduce this fragmentation, we introduce a new open access, permanent, digital repository of best practices documentation (〈ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://oceanbestpractices.org" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"〉oceanbestpractices.org〈/ext-link〉) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). The new OBPS provides an opportunity space for the centralized and coordinated improvement of ocean observing methods. The OBPS repository employs user-friendly software to significantly improve discovery and access to methods. The software includes advanced semantic technologies for search capabilities to enhance repository operations. In addition to the repository, the OBPS also includes a peer reviewed journal research topic, a forum for community discussion and a training activity for use of best practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities. Using selected ocean observing examples, we show how the OBPS supports this objective. This paper lays out a future vision of ocean best practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come.

Description: There is an ever-present need for the identification and dissemination of best practices in the multidisciplinary field of ocean observation. However, the complexity of this domain and the diversity of its stakeholders make discovering relevant best practices (BP) a considerable challenge. Addressing this challenge rests upon a) the creation of a basic resource for the efficient discovery and access of documented best practices and b) the acquisition and management of sufficient best practice documentation. A trusted and stable archive location is needed as a focal point for the community, harmonizing the formats of best practice documents and ensuring their contents are exposed to the Web. Further, the discoverability of content must be augmented using granular indexing while its provenance (including any certification) and value must be exposed to support scientists in their search for appropriate methods. This paper presents our efforts in creating a centralized and well-indexed OceanBestPractices repository, implemented to provide sustained access to community-endorsed methodologies for ocean observation. The repository is being built to expose documents to the Web and semantically index these for improved discovery using established and emerging ontologies. The repository's design will leverage persistent identifiers - such as “Open Researcher and Contributor IDs” (ORCIDs) for human agents and “International Geo Sample Numbers” (IGSNs) for samples - to facilitate distributed and stable searches across repositories. The initial results are described of semantically indexing best practice documents that have been transferred to granular, web-accessible formats, allowing comparison of related methods from multiple communities. The first two focus areas for a pilot demonstration are sensor design and data management and specific examples in each area are selected for presentation.

Description: pp. 51-72

Description: How can the marine information management community participate more actively within the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) Network? Although there are National Coordinators for Marine Information Management, there has been no other mechanism for IODE to communicate directly with other marine information professionals, and it has been a challenge for IODE to reach the broader marine information community. This changed in 2017 at the 24th session of the IOC Committee on IODE when the Committee approved the establishment of Associate Information Units (AIUs). Interested regional or national projects, programmes, institutions or organizations with information activities can apply to become an AIU, and if approved, benefit from the ability to influence the IODE Committee decisions on global marine data and information initiatives. A representative from the Joint IODE-IAMSLIC Group of Experts in Marine Information Management in a Transitional Capacity (GEMIM- in-T), which was tasked with designing and managing the application process, presented this new opportunity to conference attendees. She outlined the benefits, reviewed the Terms of Reference, described the application process, and shared progress-to-date. For anyone wishing to apply, the AIU application form is available at: http://www.iode.org/aiu