Open-access marine data, an untapped resource?
5 partners of the EU COLUMBUS project, including Marine South East recently hosted a successful marine data brokerage event for SMEs. The workshop entitled 'Power of open marine data for the blue economy' took place as part of the Connected Ocean Conference and SeaTech Week 2016 in Brest, France.
Publicly available marine data resources offer a great potential for SMEs to create value-added products and services for their customers. The workshop aimed at linking with some of those SMEs as well as other users working on the public-private interface, and collecting their feedback on experiences, needs, bottlenecks, and suggestions for improvements.
The workshop was organized within the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 COLUMBUS project. COLUMBUS works to bridge the gap between the knowledge and information collected through EU projects and concrete applications for Blue Growth sectors.
It has been recognized that making public marine data available to private sector will drive forward innovation and competition. The EU Member States and European institutions fund a large number of ocean observing research and infrastructure activities to derive marine data for various science, policy, and society needs. It has been estimated that making high-quality marine data held by public bodies in the EU widely available would improve productivity by over Euro 1 billion a year.
A number of European initiatives have been harvesting marine data collected by publicly-funded national and pan-European initiatives. Much progress has been made over the last years in helping users to become informed about the data available, visualize these data, download them in required geographical location and format, and acquire the metadata for the required dataset. However, a number of bottlenecks still exist, spanning data availability, quality, user-friendly format and web services.
For more information on the event and the COLUMBUS initiative please visit:
http://www.columbusproject.eu/
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