Making environmental data flows into linked open statistical data
The Marine Institute is one of six public sector agencies from across Europe that are actively involved in the OpenGovIntelligence (OGI) project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. We are the State agency responsible for marine research, technology development and innovation in Ireland. We provide scientific and technical advice to Government to help inform policy and to support the sustainable development of Ireland’s marine resource.
Along with other key Irish marine data providers, our data are publicly available through Ireland’s Digital Ocean. This platform is built on an installation of the ERDDAP data server software (developed by NOAA) and provides an application programming interface (API) to allow external users the same access to data for their own use cases as is provided to drive the Ireland’s Digital Ocean website.
This supports co-creation as the data from live feeds delivered by marine infrastructure, such as weather and wave buoys or tide gauges, can be incorporated into services in real-time by anyone.
As an OGI pilot partner we are involved to enable Marine Institute data, collected in real-time from Galway Bay, to be used as Linked Open Statistical Data. We’ve been working with the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUIG who have written services to transform our data streams to RDF data cubes. These cubes can then be visualised and interpreted using Linked Data technologies.
There are three pilot dashboards, which are being developed by Insight and the use cases selected for the OGI project are:
1. Search and rescue
2. Marine Renewable Energy
3. Marine Tourism and Leisure
Project partners Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands put together a short animation describing the rationale behind the search and rescue pilot:
We hope to bring you more blog posts as the pilots are finalised and released over the next 12 months.
