Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) "Publicly Funded Data, Publicly Available"

The Australian Ocean Data Centre Joint Facility (AODC-JF) was established to provide a modern, whole-of-government approach to ocean data management in Australia. The AODC-JF vision was "To put in place, by June 2011, an interoperable, online network of marine and coastal data resources, including data from the six AODC Joint Facility partner agencies, supported by standards-based metadata, which will serve data to support Australia's science, education, environmental management and policy needs: Australia's digital ocean commons." Building upon the publicly funded, open source, and scalable information infrastructure of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) which includes the software tools, the IMOS Ocean Portal and the GeoNetwork Metadata Entry and Search Tool (MEST), this vision is now achievable. This paper will articulate progress in establishing the AODN.