©2020 Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office.Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation
The way BCO-DMO manages data consists of a combination of people and computing resources. The people include the investigators who collect or generate the data and information, the people who process the data, and the BCO-DMO data managers that help get the data organized and made web accessible. The computing resources include a combination of data and web servers and software to make data and information discoverable, available online for visualizing, and downloadable.
BCO-DMO's data stewardship philosophy encompasses all phases of the data life cycle from "proposal to preservation". Our view of the data life cycle include the following eight steps: science proposal writing; data acquisition; analysis and synthesis; data contribution; discovery and access; data use and reuse; publication; and preservation.
BCO-DMO Data Managers work closely with the investigators to ensure that the metadata needed for data discovery, use, and reuse are collected and preserved. This includes information about the design of the experiment, data acquisition details including instruments used, and data processing steps used to convert field measurements into final, useful data. The Data Manager also works closely with the data contributor(s) once the data are contributed to BCO-DMO to determine the best way to organize and display the data. These tasks are people resource intensive but we feel very strongly that this approach results in higher quality data and data that can be found and effectively and accurately reused by others.
The software and hardware architecture consists of the Drupal content management system (using the MySQL database) to manage both the static web content and the metadata information; geospatial access provided by MapServer, OpenLayers, and Java-based software; the JGOFS/GLOBEC data management system providing the "back-end" distributed storage and access to data; and other software components. The organization of these components are summarize in our Architectural Overview figure.
©2020 Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office.