>> Overview

In summer 2004, an integrated team from all NOAA's Line Offices was formed to prepare a report, entitled "NOAA Pacific Islands Region Data Management Report", in response to Senate Report Number 108-144 (U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriations for the Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State). The report addresses the immediate needs of oceanographic data, products and services in the Pacific Islands Region and suggests a pilot study to stress the production of integrated data products if resources were to be made available.

In late February 2005, the NOAA PRIDE (Pacific Region Integered Data Enterprise)* project funded Dr. Charles Sun's proposal titled "Integrated Pacific Region Data Delivery for Low and High Bandwidth Internet Connections" to leverage from and integrate numerous newly developed, proven technologies and prototypes to develop and implement operationally a Pacific regional ocean data and information portal (PRODIP) within a year.

The goal of PRODIP is to develop and implement an end-to-end ocean data and information portal with capabilities of exploring in-situ data from real-time data streams and integrating the data streams with archives across the Internet through a "one-stop shopping" (single interface) query for users who have a high bandwidth Internet connection. Alternatively, users without high-speed network access can order CD/DVD-ROMs from the NODC that contain the integrated dataset and then use software over potentially low-bandwidth/high-latency network connections to periodically update the CD/DVD-ROM-based archive with new data.