Ocean data collection and access are in the midst of a revolution with new technologies, new applications and renewed national commitments to understand and manage our ocean. We have an unprecedented ability to collect and analyze information about our environment and human uses of marine natural resources and to create significant opportunities for improvement in science and decision-making.
Government agencies currently have limits to their abilities to efficiently process and incorporate ocean data from new sources, including new technologies, into the decision-making process. In some cases, the data management infrastructure has not kept pace with the nearly exponential increase in data that the public and private sectors are now collecting. This problem is compounded by the reality that data-sharing programs are not always designed to benefit all stakeholders or the public equally, information is not accessible due to technical barriers, or longstanding cultural practices of withholding data to protect intellectual property, particularly in academia and industry.
Ocean data providers and stewards are beginning to address issues of data accessibility and discovery through frameworks such as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles, which aim to facilitate the open and free exchange of data in the ocean observation community. This paper reflects a comprehensive literature review, discussions from a February 2020 Ocean Data Roundtable hosted by the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) in partnership with Ocean Conservancy, Esri, NOAA, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, and interviews with ocean data experts.