Speaker
Description
Over the past decade, German marine research centers have increasingly collaborated to improve interoperability between their locally developed information systems and to establish shared infrastructure. Today, the German Marine Research Alliance (DAM) coordinates this collaboration and the joint development of a federated marine information and data infrastructure.
One component of this infrastructure is OSIS, the Ocean Science Information System developed at GEOMAR. OSIS serves as a central integration point for expedition-related metadata, connecting information on planned, ongoing and completed expeditions, scientific activities, instruments and equipment, responsible personnel, and resulting data publications. It supports researchers, technical staff, cruise planners, and data managers in documenting and tracking the information flow from expedition planning and individual observations through to data publication and backwards. The interlinking of metadata and data throughout their entire research cycle is openly accessible through a web interface and a public API, allowing OSIS to serve both human users and other information systems.
Rather than replacing specialized systems, OSIS connects them within a federated information infrastructure. Participating institutions share responsibility for keeping information up to date through curation and automated synchronization with authoritative source systems. In particular, information on instruments, their deployment, maintenance, and status is exchanged with REGISTRY, the sensor management system operated by AWI within its observation-to-archive (O2A) framework. The interaction with DSHIP aboard research vessels integrates operational vessel data, underway observation and science activities into data provenance records. We will present recent enhancements in OSIS that further advance metadata management, interoperability and data provenance documentation across the ocean science research lifecycle.