An overview of the ocean data ecosystem

The oceans, covering approximately 70 % of Earth’s surface, play a pivotal role in climate regulation, biodiversity, and biogeochemical processes. The large and growing volume and complexity of ocean data, spanning diverse disciplines and formats, and dispersed across a wide range of sources, presents opportunities and challenges for advancing scientific research, informing policy, and addressing societal needs. In this review paper we aim to create an easy-to-navigate map of the field of ocean data, enabling the reader to establish a broad understanding of the ocean data sector, and bridging gaps between different disciplines and levels of familiarity with ocean data. This is done through the concept of the “data ecosystem”, which is used to describe the actors, organizations, and infrastructures involved in all aspects of the data value chain. We propose a structured ocean data ecosystem model as a method for comprehensive mapping of the ocean data market landscape. The proposed model consists of five key elements: stakeholders, societal elements, interoperability tools (such as standards and best practices), data sources and product offering, and emerging solutions. We provide an up-to-date analysis of ocean data sources and emerging solutions and a summary of relevant data standardization efforts such as marine standards, vocabularies, and ontologies. All this will promote the development of needs-based solutions, components, products, services, and technologies, thus contributing to the evolution of the ocean data ecosystem and promoting data-based ocean research.