New Zealand Ocean Data Network (NZODN)
This collaborative online initiative looks to gather open-access marine datasets from around New Zealand in an organised way and make these data freely available for science.
Background
The NZODN portal was launched in 2017. The infrastructure of the NZODN portal builds on developments from the Australian equivalent, the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN), and follows international standards and agreements for data/metadata formatting, discovery and sharing. Data made available through the NZODN are shared with the AODN and the World Ocean Database (WOD), the world's largest collection of uniformly formatted, quality controlled, publicly available ocean profile data providing a valuable resource for long term and historical ocean climate analysis.
NZODN and AODN are regional reflections of a growing international trend for open data resources.
Project details
NZODN allows third party users to discover, visualise, access and download a wide range of marine data. The philosophy of ‘collect once, re-use many times’ underpins NZODN and makes the portal a potential ‘one-stop-shop’ for marine-related data in New Zealand.
Many organisations such as NIWA, Cawthron Institute and MetOcean are working together to encourage data owners to contribute into the portal.
What they hope to achieve
The NZODN aims to provide discovery and access services, primarily through the NZODN Portal, to access New Zealand’s marine and climate science data. The marine data collections published in the NZODN Portal are wide-ranging and all data collections are freely available to the public.
Another aim of the proposed network is to incorporate traditional Mātauranga Māori knowledge and contribute to a more effective ocean stewardship. The collaboration initiative sets the base for the development of a world-leading ocean observing system and to enable data to be openly accessed for the benefit of the whole country.
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