Oceanography: Plenty of bits in the sea | The Economist

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-03-03

Summary:

"NO ONE owns the ocean. The same cannot be said of oceanographic data. Some are publicly available through organisations such as America's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the British Oceanographic Data Centre. But plenty remain stashed away in corporate safes. Oil and other resource firms, shipping or fishing companies and the like have no incentive to share the information they gathered, often at considerable cost. Now a start-up called OneOcean hopes to give them one. OneOcean lets owners of data upload them in a variety of file formats to its data exchange, hosted on Amazon's cloud. It then creates a 'clip card' for each upload, containing a description of the stored information. These metadata are then cross-referenced with a map of Earth. Anybody interested in, say, the geology of the Gulf of Mexico or the biochemistry of the Barents Sea can click on the map to check whether relevant data are available. For now OneOcean does not convert the files into a single format so buyers must have the software required to read and edit the data. But the company thinks its clip cards will help people determine if the data is worth accessing in the first place. If someone is interested in the data and the data owner wants to sell it, the price will be displayed on the clip card (though buyers will be free to haggle with sellers). OneOcean will take a cut of the sale. It also plans to offer subscriptions. Customers pay a monthly fee based on how much data they use. The hope is that government agencies like NOAA join the service. They already pay to store, manage and share their data. OneOcean might be able to do it for less, while preserving free access. But to begin with, OneOcean is inviting businesses to use the system internally or with commercial partners ..."

Link:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/02/oceanography

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.business_models oa.comment oa.metadata oa.preservation oa.costs oa.formats oa.geo oa.prices oa.oceanography oa.noaa oa.cloud oa.oneocean

Date tagged:

03/03/2013, 11:17

Date published:

03/03/2013, 06:17