Coastal Services Center

Cross Regional Activities

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Standards Integration of QA/QC Requirements for Oceanographic Observing Systems

Date project initiated: October 1, 2007

Principal Investigator:
Janet Fredericks
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, MA 02543
(508) 289-2573
jfredericks@whoi.edu

Brief project summary:
With support from NOAA, a grass roots organization, Quality Assurance in Real Time Oceanographic Data (QARTOD), has met regularly over the past few years, working towards the definition of minimum requirements in quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) in four focus areas: waves, in situ currents, conductivity and temperature, and dissolved oxygen. Investigators will supplement the ongoing QARTOD activities by demonstrating an implementation of the QARTOD results. For each focus area, investigators propose to define and document the QA/QC requirements, as they relate to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, in particular the Sensor Web Enablement initiative. With these requirements, the team will prepare a common data model, providing data dictionaries and defining relevant profiles in SensorML. The data model, dictionaries and profiles will be reviewed by focus area experts, as well as representatives from data centers to confirm that a functional and feasible model has been developed. Once the model is finalized, the development team will design any required methods and generate a tutorial for implementation of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards for the QA/QC of the focus area (e.g., waves). The team will also provide associated XML-generating tools that evolve for the generation of QA/QC templates for each of the focus areas, facilitating implementation by participating data providers.

Local data providers will implement the QA/QC standards, as defined within this project through the OOSTethys Sensor Observations Service (SOS), maintained by the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS) as part of a relatively broad community activity involving the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project. Other OOSTethys participants will be informed of the capabilities through the cookbooks and best practices documents being developed on their site (www.oostethys.org), and encouraged to participate through travel support requested in this proposal. The deliverables will be made publicly available through the MMI web site (www.marinemetadata.org) and open source software implementations and cookbooks through www.oostethys.org.

 

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