data guidelines

 Announcement of Opportunity. MEDIN would like to let contracts for organisations to  test the practical application of these guidelines and provide feedback on their  suitability. Further details and here. Closing date for tenders is 3rd August.

Data guidelines are sets of requirements that must be recorded when data of a certain type is being collected. MEDIN-approved guidelines are available below. Further information on how the guidelines are structured and xls templates for the data are available here.

Benthic invertebrate sediment sampling by grab or core (15jul10)
A
rchiving digital images (15jul10)
Offshore litter data by trawl, dredge or towed sledge (15jul10)
Oceanographic vertical profile data (15jul10)
Cetacean sighting and identification (15jul10)
Fish and benthos by static pot, net or trap (15jul10)
Shellfish stock assessment (15jul10)
Fish and benthos by trawl or dredge (15jul10)
Moored oceanographic instruments (15jul10)
Oceanographic underway transect (15jul10)
Water sample for biology or chemistry (15jul10)
Video tow surveys for species or biotopes (20jul10)

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The principle benefits of these standards are to:

- Instill good practice amongst users
- Allow contracting organisations to specify a format that data should be returned in that   can be readily used and includes all relevant attributes
- Provide a consistent format for contractors to work to (rather than a different format for   each contract)
- Allow easy ingestion of data to Data Archiving Centres
- Improve interoperability between organisations by proving a format which can be used to   import and export data

MEDIN are in the process of deriving guidelines for other physical oceanographic measurements, noise, biology and seabed mapping and geophysics. If you wish to provide input to this process please contact enquiries@oceannet.org. In the interim period while further guidelines are being written and approved by MEDIN we recommend that other marine data standards should be used.