The Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI) is an interdisciplinary research program seeking to understand the influence of the environment on the abundance of various commercially valuable fish and shellfish stocks in Alaskan waters and their role in the ecosystem. To meet the need of the FOCI collaborators, we have built upon two previous projects: OceanShare (http://www.epic.noaa.gov/collab), a robust prototype collaborative tool based on the CORBA, Java and Habanero technologies, and the Climate Data Portal (http://www.epic.noaa.gov/cdp), a powerful, flexible and extensible Data Server. The new collaborative tool expands OceanShare data types from profile-type data to accommodate a wide range of oceanographic and atmospheric in-situ and gridded data types.

The FOCI scientists also need a system that will enable text, graphics, data, and OceanShare sessions to be easily shared. This requirement is satisfied by creating the Secure Document Repository (SDR). The SDR is developed using the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol and software. WebDAV enabled clients can access distributed file systems via the http protocol. The SDR will provide distributed file access from custom Java applications and WebDAV enabled commercial applications, e.g. Internet Explorer.