• Organizational and technical solutions
  for building and sharing a sustainable e-infrastructure
  
  
• Data lifecycle management
  workflows and procedures from data ingestion to data publication

• Networking and outreach
  strategies for disseminating quality-controlled marine data at national and international levels and education

The overall concept is to build a federation of trusted content providers and offer ultimately a service platform including a portal for accessing aggregated content. The major challenge here is to find interoperable solutions, which lead beyond minimalistic discovery services. The major challenges here are to include steps for quality assessment/assurance and to make this work easier for scientists and less resource-intensive.
An incremental approach to specify and implement technical and organizational improvements is made inevitable: there is already an enormous resource of major infrastructure components, ongoing project work and data available at the partners’ sites.
MaNIDA and the individual partners need to track the evolutionary change of behaviour of scientists to share data and their acceptance of data publication and “data intensive science”.

Management

WP1 consists of a management team for rapid decision making for operational and implementation questions, a steering committee for strategic decisions and for giving guidance for higher acceptance of the overall system architecture by the scientific community. Two spokesmen will take care to establish and maintain links to the scientific community on a national and international level and coordinate public outreach of the institute. Infrastructure and workflow operations will be evaluated for realistic long-term funding.

Workflows

WP2 will deal with matters mainly at the “input” side, i.e.: how to improve completeness and quality of data holdings. Its solutions will need to find essentially acceptance at all data producing scientific institutions and agencies in Germany.

Data Integration and Access

WP3 will work out solutions for existing problems, and for functions desired by users for an effective and sustainable implementation of the whole system. New aspects of data integration based on workflows for the operational combination of data and models in an innovative way will be developed. Hence case studies for the feasibility of this approach with several prototypic workflows will be implemented. Methods for harmonisation of data and metadata from different providers must be developed.

Infrastructure

WP4 will implement and reliably provide incrementally improving solutions for the needs of the scientific community. International interoperability standards from OGC and others will be taken into account – as well as limited but popular mashup-technologies.  Concurrently, further improvements will be worked out in two work packages:

Networking and Outreach

WP5 will gather and refine, from all stakeholders, initial and evolving requirements and practical constraints, promote the solutions developed and gather feedback on the value and practicability of implemented infrastructure and workflows. Thus, a strong coupling with the scientific community for both strands of development, for operations and business model will be provided.