Ocean Observing System Instrument Network Infrastructure

We summarize results of a Workshop on Instrument Software Infrastructure held at MBARI, Moss Landing, California USA from September 13-15, 2004, jointly sponsored the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION) program. The Workshop included over fifty participants, including international participants from Germany, Canada, and Japan. This was one of the first technical workshops in the development of a series of ocean observatories under the US Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) being managed under the ORION program. The specific focus of this workshop was to define the standard requirements to be met by software infrastructure for sensors, instruments and platforms for observing systems in the ORION program. These requirements include the issues of configuring, interfacing, and managing devices, including sensors and actuators, to a networked based observing system as well as managing the resources necessary to support such devices. The topics include the capability of supporting plug-and-work instrumentation using service oriented network architecture. A major issue addressed is the observatory infrastructure requirements necessary for managing data and metadata coming from sensors and instruments of the observatory in support of an integrated data management system