Enabling central access to marine data: Data portal German marine research

Timely access to quality data and linkage of data beyond disciplinary boundaries is essential for the marine research community. Therefore the national “Marine Network for Integrated Data Access” is establishing the “Data Portal German Marine Research” to facilitate seamless access to marine data and services and to promote the exchange and dissemination of marine data interlinked with corresponding scientific publications. In that course the data portal was conceptualized and developed to provide a “one-stop-shop” approach to marine research data from various data providers in terms of coherent discovery, view, download and dissemination of scientific data and publications. The data portal is based on a central harvesting and interfacing approach by connecting distributed data sources. To achieve interoperability the data portal makes use of internationally endorsed standards (e.g., ISO, OGC, OAI-PMH). In this paper we provide information on details of content, functionality, services, architecture, interfaces and standards of the data portal and the network of contributing data providers.