Accessing existing and emerging best practices for ocean observation a new approach for end-to-end management of best practices

There is an ever-present need for the identification and dissemination of best practices in the multidisciplinary field of ocean observation. However, the complexity of this domain and the diversity of its stakeholders make discovering relevant best practices (BP) a considerable challenge. Addressing this challenge rests upon a) the creation of a basic resource for the efficient discovery and access of documented best practices and b) the acquisition and management of sufficient best practice documentation. A trusted and stable archive location is needed as a focal point for the community, harmonizing the formats of best practice documents and ensuring their contents are exposed to the Web. Further, the discoverability of content must be augmented using granular indexing while its provenance (including any certification) and value must be exposed to support scientists in their search for appropriate methods. This paper presents our efforts in creating a centralized and well-indexed OceanBestPractices repository, implemented to provide sustained access to community-endorsed methodologies for ocean observation. The repository is being built to expose documents to the Web and semantically index these for improved discovery using established and emerging ontologies. The repository's design will leverage persistent identifiers - such as “Open Researcher and Contributor IDs” (ORCIDs) for human agents and “International Geo Sample Numbers” (IGSNs) for samples - to facilitate distributed and stable searches across repositories. The initial results are described of semantically indexing best practice documents that have been transferred to granular, web-accessible formats, allowing comparison of related methods from multiple communities. The first two focus areas for a pilot demonstration are sensor design and data management and specific examples in each area are selected for presentation.