Ocean data integration: Successes and lessons learned from the bleeding edge

NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) and the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®) Program Office have collaborated for several years on a major data integration project to increase interoperability between data providers and the user community. The ultimate goal of the collaboration was to better serve the information needs of researchers, scientists, operational managers, and the public. In this CWP, we provide some background on the motivation and justification for why CO-OPS and NDBC participated in this effort and elaborate on some of the experiences of these two Federal partners during that project. We enumerate a series of general outcomes of the project and identify lessons learned by CO-OPS, NDBC, and the larger IOOS data management community. Finally, we provide suggestions for community wide expansion of select data integration technologies, where they fit in a larger Data Management and Communications (DMAC) architecture and comments on the unique roles of CO-OPS and NDBC as essential elements of the observational and data management infrastructure of the Integrated Ocean Observing System.