Date and time

Monday 9 November, 9:00 - 17:00

Description

The Integrated Marine Observing System, or IMOS (www.imos.org.au), is a nation-wide collaborative program designed to observe the oceans around Australia, including the coastal oceans and the ‘bluewater’ open oceans. IMOS provides data to support research on many of the critical marine issues facing Australia, including climate change and sustainability of ecosystems. All IMOS data is free and publically available.

The IMOS strategic research-goal is to assemble and provide free, open and timely access to streams of data. The data user workshop aims to increase the awareness and use of the high quality IMOS data, facilitate communication within the marine science community and enable participants to examine practical examples of the data.

The workshop will introduce researchers to the IMOS Project and its present status, and demonstrate how the data is accessible, discoverable and down-loadable through a set of tutorial activities. Within hands-on sessions participants will examine worked examples that utilise a number of data tools and illustrate data –

• Interrogation,
• Integration,
• Visualisation, and
• Interpretation.

Outline

1. Introduction - an introduction to the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) and eMarine Information Infrastructure (eMII), the project, its rationale and science. Each of the data streams will be explained, with an introduction to the current and future use of the data, including examples of the community perspective of IMOS.
   45 minutes
    
2. Data Access, Discovery and Download – a discussion of the underlying data management principles, standards and activities. This session will explore the infrastructure, standards and dataflows used by eMII; walk through the IMOS Ocean Portal and IMOS Metadata Entry and Search Tool (MEST) and respective functionality and introduce Data Turbine, the middleware used for delivery of real-time data.
   60 minutes
    
3. Guided Worked Examples and Tutorials – a hands on session navigating the IMOS Ocean Portal and IMOS Metadata Entry and Search Tool (MEST). The session will cover extensive navigation and functionality of the portal, the search functionality within the portal and MEST for data and metadata discovery and, via guided tutorial questions, illustrate using the data to answer scientific cases.
   120 minutes
    
4. Summary and Feedback – a summary of the topics discussed during the day and a ‘crystal ball’ view of the future developments for both IMOS and the delivery and visualisation tools for the data.
   30 minutes

Who should attend

The workshop is suitable for post graduate students and researchers within the Marine Sciences. May also be relevant to Data Managers interested in the methodology adopted. 

What to bring

Attendees will be required to bring their laptop. The IMOS Ocean Portal and IMOS MEST are web applications that operate with the latest stable versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, along with other modern browsers.

About the presenters

Dr Roger Proctor
Director of eMII since July 2008. Education: a BSc in Mathematics (1976) and a PhD in numerical marine modeling (1982). From 1980 to 2008 he was a research scientist at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool (UK), a component laboratory of the Natural Environment Research Council. During this time he developed an interest first, in developing modeling systems for operational forecasting in coastal seas (ranging from tide and water level forecasting, and later coupled physical-biochemical forecasting) then, in developing operational observing systems to integrate with the model systems. From 2000-2007 he was Leader of the research program ‘Models and Observation Systems for shelf seas’ and from 2007-2008 leader of the program on the ‘Integration of Sustained Observations in the Marine Environment’. General interests in integrating models with data, and in exploiting the value of observations.