Bringing Ocean Data to the Cloud

New technologies for real time underway collections, multibeam surveys, and satellite oceanography, have led to an exponential increase in the amount of data collected, stored and processed for hydrographic and ocean research. New studies report that over 90% of all data collected are never examined and this is not limited to ocean data. This unused data is called “dark data”. The data are not used not because they are unusable or of poor quality, but because they are not easily searchable, are in proprietary formats, or are too large to transfer or accessed.

Workflows and software applications have evolved to adapt to this increase and they enable scientists and data managers to maintain a sense of control over the data. However, these data volumes are now exceeding the ability to efficiently store, manage, discover, analyze and present the information captured. One proven solution to this problem is to use cloud technologies for data storage sharing, mining and scaling and enabling enterprise search for data discovery and visualization.

This presentation will give an overview of how cloud technologies can be applied to ocean big data to share, transfer and collaborate and how meta-visualization, data tagging, and enterprise search techniques can be used to optimize data discovery within the ocean realm.