Intern:WDC-MARE



During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, the World Data Center (WDC) system was created; in 1968, ICSU (International Council of Science), providing the umbrella of the system, established a panel to coordiante and monitor the activities of the centers. Head of the panel since 2006 is Hartmut Graßl, MPI Hamburg (successor of Ferris Webster, University of Delaware). The WDC system consists of over fifty designated data centers, which collect, manage, and distribute a wide range of defined geophysical, solar and environmental data. As the first german center the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) was founded in 2001. It is maintained by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) with additional support of the DFG research center ocean margins (rcom).

WDC-MARE is aimed at collecting, scrutinizing, and disseminating data related to Global Change in the fields of environmental oceanography, marine geosciences, and marine biology. It focuses on georeferenced data (numeric, text, and any kind of binary objects) using the data library PANGAEA as its long-term archive both at the national and international level. PANGAEA is operated as a library and publishing system for georeferenced data from earth system research. WDC-MARE with PANGAEA provide expertise in information handling and any fields of data management as a partner in international research projects. Data collections of projects are published on CD-ROM in the WDC-MARE Reports. The reports are distributed to about 400 libraries worldwide, in particular to help bridging the Digital Divide in countries with limited Internet access.

The data cover the world oceans, ranging from the lower atmosphere - surface ocean exchange, the full water column, marine sediments with parameter from biological, chemical, physical and geological oceanography. A significant proportion consists of data from XBT, CTD and bottle profiles. Some data are time series or from moorings, the holdings include plankton and benthos data and a collection of sediment core and ocean floor images. Major contributions are
 * Oceanographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean
 * Compilation of all JGOFS data
 * Mirror of WOCE
 * Compilation of silica related data for EU-project ORFOIS
 * Marine meteorology along cruise tracks of RV Polarstern

Many data have been contributed by scientists who have published their results in peer-reviewed literature; others are e.g. monitoring observations, routinely executed documentation and investigations of sediments or measurements along cruise tracks.

WDC-MARE generally complies with international standards in science and technology and works with suppliers and users to define preferred formats. Special emphasis is given on the definition of parameters in standard units; projects are provided with a dictionary of project specific variables as required for a sustainable data archiving ensuring an added value. On the Internet data are provided in technical standards as XML-format with fields following the standard metadata for georeferenced data ISO19115. OAI-MPH standard ensures harvesting of the WDC-MARE/PANGAEA content by other systems and provision of the metainformation through portals.

WDC-MARE is fostering good data management practices, in particular it has implemented full and Open Access. All data are freely available through an easy-to-use search engine (PangaVista). Thus the center follows consequently the recommendations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. Any regulations, responsibility, and definitions of data flow and quality are described in detail in the data policy of Pangaea, according to the Principles and Responsibilities of ICSU World Data Centers.

WDC-MARE guarantes long-term availability of scientific primary data related to publications. Using Pangaea as a publisher, it provides a bibliographic citation for each data set including a persistent identifier (Digital Object Identifier, DOI). Citations are available through the catalog of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) as the global publishing agent for scientific primary data. Citations and meta-descriptions are also distributed through various portals in the future. With the data citation, following bibliographic standards, and a simple, global and reliable access through the DOI, full credit to the data contributors is ensured.

Besides contributing to some of the major research programms like core projects of ICSU/IGBP, the ICSU/IPY, IODP or the recent leading marine research projects of the European Commission, WDC-MARE intends also to provide its infrastucture and archiving capabilities to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Recently the center also has developed an Open Source software for portal functionality, which might be used to establish a central access point for any data archived through the WDC system. This effort is part of the development of an international framework as claimed in the Scientific Data and Information report of ICSU, 2004. The first operational portal based on the WDC-MARE software is the central gateway to distributed carbon data through the EU-project CarboOceans.

WDC-MARE is part of the German WDC-Cluster.


 * WDC-MARE
 * World Data Center System
 * Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
 * MARUM & rcom
 * Budapest Open Access Initiative
 * Berlin Declaration on Open Access
 * Directory of Open Access Journals
 * GEO/GEOSS