Applying Open Geospatial Consortium's Sensor Web Enablement to address real-time oceanographic data quality, secondary data use, and long-term preservation

Key to the appropriate use of data is the knowledge of data quality. This knowledge is critical for products and decision-support tools that utilize real-time data, and it is also essential for the longer term application of data as well. Guidance by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for appraising observational data for archive states that factors favoring long-term or permanent retention include the uniqueness, completeness, and quality of observational data and the quality and completeness of metadata. The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), the designated archive center for oceanographic data in the U.S., requires that data submitted be documented to enable secondary use and ensure data posterity. Such metadata should include not only geospatial characteristics and time periods of observations, but also the collection methods, instrumentation used, units of measure, acceptable values, error tolerance, processing history, quality assessments and explanations of quality flags, data aggregation methods, and other pertinent information. Providing this information in a consistent manner can be a challenge. However, an approach to capturing and conveying this metadata using community-developed practices for ocean observing system data and metadata is well underway. This paper presents methods of capturing data and provenance of data quality using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework. It describes the types of metadata content captured and demonstrates the utility and significance of defining and registering terms to enable semantic, as well as syntactic, interoperability. The SWE framework provides an avenue for conveying quality flags and methods used to make assurances about the integrity of oceanographic data for real-time consumption and for potential submittal to permanent archives such as NODC.