Biological oceanography datasets from Centre for Estuarine and Marine Ecology (NIOO-CEME)

The National Oceanographic Data Committee (NODC) of the Netherlands is the national platform for exchange of oceanographic and marine data and information, and for advisory services in the field of ocean and marine data management. The overall objective of the NODC is to effect a major and significant improvement in the overview and access to marine and oceanographic data and data-products from government and research institutes in the Netherlands. This is not done alone and only with a national focus, but on a European scale as an active partner in the Pan-European SeaDataNet project, complying to the INSPIRE and the new Marine Strategy EU Directives, and on a global scale as the Netherlands representative in major international organisations in this field, ICES and IOC-IODE. A major step has been made with the launch of the NODCi — National Infrastructure for Access to Oceanographic and Marine Data and Information. This was developed in the framework of the Space for Geo-Information (RGI) programme as RGI-014 project. It includes a new NODC-i portal (www.nodc.nl), which provides users with a range of metadata services and a unique interface to the data management systems of each of the NODC members. By this Common Data Index (CDI) interface, users can get harmonised access to the datasets, that are managed in a distributed way at each of the NODC members. The NODCi portal functions as the Dutch node in the SeaDataNet infrastructure. The NODC CDI service contains several thousand of references to individual marine and oceanographic datasets. For inclusion in the National Geo Register these have been aggregated by combinations of Data Holding Centres — Disciplines. Each NGR — NODC record therefore represents a large number of individual metadata records and associated datasets. By following the specified URL to the NODCi portal, users can consider these metadata in detail and can achieve downloading of interesting datasets via the shopping cart transaction system, which is integrated in the NODCi portal.