Data

The OpenEarth philosophy related to data involves that important data sets, rather than working on a project-by-project basis, should be collected and be made available in a project-superceding manner.

OpenEarth intends all datasets to conform with a number of basic quality criteria:

• data is not just numbers and mata-information, but raw data (e.g.volts) + processing scripts.
• raw data should be stored in the OpenEarthRawData repository enabling version control
• raw data should then be enriched with metadata and processed into useful file formats (netCDF) using transformation scripts also put under version control in the OpenEarthRawData repository
• resulting data products should conform to the best open source standards available
• data products should be made available easily via webbased interfaces and with automated procedures

To achieve this international standards are embraced like:

• NetCDF
• CF parameter meta-data
• EPSG
• Spatial meta-data codes
• INSPIRE owner meta-data
• Creative Commons philosophy
• OPeNDAP (as running operationally for Rijkswaterstaat MATROOS), and
• OpenGIS
  • web map services (WMS),
  • web coverage services (WCS), and
  • web feature services (WFS).

The data collection procedure and the relation between those standards is explained in the OpenEarth Data Standards document, developed in the framework of the EU FP7 Project MICORE. Currently data sets are being uploaded to the OPeNDAP test server. Example sinclude:

• Rijkswaterstaat coastal bathymetry data
• Rijkswaterstaat coastal grain size fields
• Rijkswaterstaat sediment atlas Wadden Sea
• A subset of the Rijkswaterstaat DONAR database from waterbase.nl (water levels, salinity, temperature, SPM, chlorofyll)
• KNMI NOAA SST satellite images
• KNMI wind and meteo time series.

Numerous other datasets have been or are being uploaded continually in the MICORE and Building with Nature research programmes.

Related initiatives:

• VLIZ Data Centre
• NODC
• MATROOS
• 3TU.Datacentrum