Shipwrecked: Expedition Data Challenges and the AQUAVIEW Solution

AQUAVIEW is a metadata management system that consolidates access to data from multiple expeditions and external datasets within a single platform. AQUAVIEW addresses the problem of non-co-located data by offering a unified portal for users to easily access and retrieve data from multiple sources. Similar in some respects to a traditional ETL pipeline, AQUAVIEW's focus on metadata rather than underlying database structure makes it relatively unique among approaches within the NOAA data ecosystem. This paper documents the initial development and deployment of AQUAVIEW and examines the strengths and challenges of the approach.