Table of Contents

• Coverage
• Dataset Description
  • Methods & Sampling
  • Data Processing Description
• Data Files
• Supplemental Files
• Related Publications
• Parameters
• Project Information
• Funding

We conducted a stakeholder needs study during three oceanographic meetings to determine potential enhancements the BCO-DMO repository could make to improve its service to the research community.

We conducted a stakeholder needs study during three oceanographic meetings to determine potential enhancements the BCO-DMO repository could make to improve its service to the research community. For each question, participants were directed to use corresponding stickers to indicate their first, second and third choices in response to the following questions:

1. Accessing data: What file formats do you use?
2. Searching for data: What search facets (categories) are most important to you?
3. Data tools: What programming languages and tools do you use?
4. New requests: What new tools and features would be useful to you?

The poster was presented at:

• The Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry (OCB) Summer Workshop in Woods Hole, MA  June 24-27 2019. 
• The Ocean Obs’19 Meeting in Honolulu, HI September 16-20 2019. Updates were made to the poster based on feedback received during the OCB meeting. The “Searching for data” section’s geospatial response option was split into geospatial by region and geospatial by point location. Additionally, the response option “Searching by Award number” was removed.  
• The Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, CA February 16-21 2020. Additional changes were made to the poster based on feedback received during the Ocean Obs’19 meeting. The option for xls/xlsx was added as a response choice to the “Accessing data” question.

Remarks on data acquisition: 

Updates were made to the poster prior to the OceanObs’19 Meeting, based on feedback received during the OCB meeting. The “Searching for data” section’s “Geospatial” response option was split into “Geospatial by region” and “Geospatial by point location” options. The response option “Searching by Award number” was removed. An additional change was made to the poster based on feedback received during the OceanObs’19 meeting by adding a response choice for .xls/.xlsx file formats to the “Accessing data” question.

It should be noted that on occasion a sticker that was not mapped as the first, second, or third choice option was used erroneously. We noted these errors in a comments field. It was also noticed that some participants only provided us with their first choice answers.

These data represent raw participant responses resulting from their engagement with the interactive posters. Data were processed with Excel.

NSF Award Abstract:

Scientific research is intrinsically reliant upon the creation, management, analysis, synthesis, and interpretation of data. Once generated, data are essential to demonstrating the veracity and reproducibility of scientific results, and existing data hold great potential to accelerate scientific discovery through reuse. The Biological and Chemical Oceanography and Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) was created in 2006 to assemble, curate, and publicly serve all data and related products resulting from grants funded by the NSF core programs for Biological and Chemical Oceanography, and Office of Polar Programs. BCO-DMO provides limnological and marine chemical, biological, and physical data inventories from several large and intermediate-sized programs, as well as single-investigator projects to support cross-disciplinary collaboration to address pressing environmental questions, problems, and challenges that are exacerbated with the increasing pace of climate change. BCO-DMO is committed to data management capacity building efforts, improving data literacy and increasing science engagement in data management topics through education, training, and outreach. The project collaborates with academic institutions and teachers, where the BCO-DMO database is leveraged for oceanographic curricula, and engages in targeted training of informatics students, cross-pollinating their knowledge with geoscience domain data management.

BCO-DMO's goal is to facilitate the integration of its diverse datasets to enable researchers to achieve a deeper understanding of ocean ecological and biogeochemical systems. As a domain repository, BCO-DMO adds value and improves interoperability of data to support activities such as synthesis and modeling, and the reuse of oceanographic data for new research. Open access to the BCO-DMO database lowers barriers to allow economically challenged countries to gain access to research quality data for field decision support, policy-relevant issues, and educational purposes. The project takes an active role in the exchange of knowledge at national and international geoscience and informatics meetings and workshops, where standards development and adoption occur. BCO-DMO also participates in the development and use of open-source, standards-based technologies that enable interoperable data systems to exchange data and information that will foster next-generation research in all disciplines. While continuing to perform its core mission of data management, BCO-DMO will reconstitute its data infrastructure to mobilize a new adaptive data management strategy for addressing the evolutionary change coinciding with the big data revolution. Leveraging data semantics BCO-DMO will construct a knowledge graph for sustainably operating an adaptive data repository. This infrastructure will support dataset-level and repository-level metrics, an improved data submission experience and new data and metadata access capabilities. Through declarative workflows, the processing of contributed data will increase in efficiency, and result in actionable provenance records for complete transparency of data curation practices. Taking a holistic perspective on education, outreach and community engagement, formalized programs will be developed to promote data reuse and interest in oceanographic science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.