Back to Basics: Bringing New Technologies to Forgotten Systems

Data centres and services underpin our knowledge of the ocean. Centres are under pressure to develop new technologies and interoperable infrastructures with the increase in autonomous systems, data volume, and advances in scientific processes. This causes a strain on data centres to ensure business as usual and keep up with evolving technologies. Improving how we do core tasks as well as automating tasks that don’t require human intervention frees up valuable time and resource for effort required to put into new systems. The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) have begun automating the routine tasks done by data managers, increasing our engagement with the science community and improving outdated technologies while making data more FAIR. We built an app that allows originators to load their files, input and validate key metadata, improving findability and interoperability of the data while also demonstrating the importance of metadata and the controlled vocabularies used by BODC. A data manager can then check over the submission and either edit, ask questions, or archive the data. Building on the success of the new workflow, it was expanded to seamlessly publish data and metadata with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to support findability. The next step was reworking the entire complex ingestion process for discrete sample and timeseries data, with fully integrated metadata validation, visual screening, and additional controlled vocabularies. Metadata captured in a submission can be automatically carried through the entire ingestion workflow to allow information to be input once and used throughout BODC systems supporting reusability of data. The latest work has seen integration with data management plans for each project into our internal tracking systems which then flows into submissions and publications. It’s important to step back and ensure the less glamorous, but no less important work be prioritised in order to make room for new and emerging science. Investing resource into the optimisation of existing core services provides resilience in our workflows and ensures BODC can continue to provide a world class data service to the ocean science community.