Marine Scotland open data network

Marine Scotland, a directorate of Scottish Government, comprises of policy, planning and science divisions that collectively aim to manage Scotland's seas for prosperity and sustainability. Across this wide portfolio, data underpin the decisions Marine Scotland makes and the advice it provides to Ministers and the public. A transparent and robust decision making process requires easy access to authoritative data, both for use within Marine Scotland and by external stakeholders. Marine Scotland manages three data-driven services that work in harmony to provide an Open Data Network: Marine Scotland Information, Marine Scotland Data and Marine Scotland Maps. By closely following Open Data standards and working with the INSPIRE directive and open source tools, Marine Scotland has designed a complex but highly responsive network of services to bring together data access and visualisation, GIS capabilities and an information management solution. There are an increasing number of users of the sea, and while traditional management activities such as fisheries management and environmental monitoring and assessment still feature heavily, marine spatial management, licensing of activities and protecting designated areas are becoming the integrating tools for a more holistic management of the seas. In Scotland, the Scottish Government introduced a National Marine Plan, first published in 2015, which fulfils the requirements of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, and the Maritime Spatial Planning EU Directive (2014/89/EU). During the work to prepare an assessment on the condition of the Scottish marine area, Scotland's Marine Atlas was published in 2011. To support the Atlas, and in recognition of the need to update and manage spatial information on Scotland's seas, an interactive GIS portal was developed - National Marine Plan Interactive (NMPi), now known as Marine Scotland Maps. While the GIS portal greatly enhanced stakeholder engagement and created a tool for updating and managing spatial information to support planning of activities in Scottish seas, there was recognition that additional information was often required. Information web pages for spatial layers were created - initially a manual process- and subsequently transferred to a more dynamic database driven system to facilitate reuse of information sources and links. Within the research and monitoring function of Marine Scotland, data publication was becoming a pressing matter - not just for GIS representation, but to provide persistent identifiers to facilitate collaborative data sharing, and to be used in peer reviewed publications as well as Marine Scotland's own scientific report series. To improve access, and at the same time embrace the developing Scottish Government Open Data Strategy that was published in 2015, Marine Scotland deployed an open data portal (Marine Scotland Data) using open source software and open standards. This delivers open data at 4-star rating (www.5stardata.info) while also minting persistent identifiers on the datasets to improve citation and use in scientific literature. A number of the datasets published on Marine Scotland Data were increasingly used and referenced from pages describing the work presented on the Marine Scotland Map GIS portal, and it was decided to make the supporting information web pages more integrated to provide a more holistic description and access for stakeholders as well as enabling Marine Scotland to make better use of its own published information assets. The new information portal, Marine Scotland Information (MSI), was developed on a Drupal platform which combines service data from open standards (OGC standards and DCAT JSON feeds) with content generated by staff. Vocabularies allow the categorisation of service data and other content into searchable resources that allow stakeholders to locate and read about a broader topic, and then jump to the specific datasets and map layers as required. In this way MSI acts as a central source of information, bringing the data and GIS services together. The utilisation of information available through services enabled further keywords to be automatically generated, and additional metadata on spatial layers to be supplied through MSI. This provides context, user-friendly information and guided access to Marine Scotland data. It also facilities access to the more advanced functions offered by the data and GIS portals. The combination of contextual information with direct data access and open standards means that Marine Scotland is increasingly using its external facing tools for a substantial part of its data and information management for internal work also. This paper discusses the design and functionality of the Marine Scotland open data solution, and how the systems improve information management for both Marine Scotland and its stakeholders.