SCOOP Data Management: A Standards-based Distributed System for Coastal Data and Modeling

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) coastal ocean observing and prediction (SCOOP) program is a SURA Coastal Research initiative that is deploying cutting edge information technology to advance the science of environmental prediction and hazard planning for our nation's coasts. SCOOP is a distributed program, incorporating heterogeneous data, software and hardware; thus the use of standards to enable interoperability is key to SCOOP's success. Standards activities range from internal coordination among SCOOP partners to participation in national standards efforts. As the lead partner in the SCOOP program for both data management and data translation, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is developing a suite of advanced technologies to provide core data and information management services for scientific data, including the SCOOP Catalog and a suite of standards-based web services providing Catalog access. Currently under development is a web service that will export information on SCOOP data collections in a schema compliant with the Federal Geographic Data Committee's Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata. SCOOP is also a participant in the OpenlOOS Interoperability Demonstration, which leverages open geospatial consortium (OGQ standards such as the Web map service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) protocols to display near real time coastal observations together with water level, wave, and surge forecasts. SCOOP partners are also active participants in several data and metadata standards efforts, including the national ocean sciences data management and communications metadata studies and the marine metadata interoperability project. Continued close cooperation between the IT and coastal science modeling communities is producing positive results toward a real-time modeling environment that will benefit coastal stakeholders through better predictive capabilities.