OpenEarth

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What is OpenEarth?

OpenEarth is a free and open source initiative to deal with Data, Models and Tools in marine & coastal engineering projects. In current practice, research, consultancy and construction projects commonly spend a significant part of their budget to setup some basic infrastructure for data and knowledge management. Most of these efforts disappear again once the project is finished. As an alternative to these ad-hoc approaches, OpenEarth aims for a more continuous approach to data & knowledge management. It provides a platform to archive, host and disseminate high quality data, state-of-the-art model systems and well-tested tools for practical analysis. Through this project-superseding approach, marine & coastal engineers and scientists can learn from experiences in previous projects and each other. This may lead to considerable efficiency gains, both in terms of budget and time. The following paper describes the OpenEarth approach in more detail.

Within the OpenEarth community two types of users can be distinguished: 1) OpenEarth users and 2) OpenEarth developers.

OpenEarth users

OpenEarth users are particularly interested in using data, models and tools that have become available through OpenEarth for project purposes. For these users easily installable software packages as well as user manuals and tutorials are available in the OpenEarth Product Suite. An explanation on how to get access to data is given in the Getting started section.

OpenEarth developers

OpenEarth developers participate actively in the dissemination of new datasets and model systems and the development & improvement of all kinds of handy tools. If you wanna be an OpenEarth developer, please follow this link to learn about the five easy steps to become an OpenEarth developer.