BCO-DMO: Streamlining the Ocean Data Life Cycle to Advance Interdisciplinary Research and Education

The creation, synthesis, analysis and interpretation of data are essential activities of the scientific research process. Beyond their intended analyses, resultant data hold great potential to accelerate scientific discovery through their reuse. Oceanographic research produces data that are highly heterogeneous in type, scale and format, and are often collected at great cost and effort, making them particularly valuable but challenging to manage. The Biological and Chemical Oceanography and Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) is a disciplinary repository created to address oceanographic data challenges by assembling, curating, and publishing data and related products resulting from marine and limnological research. BCO-DMO assembles, curates, and publishes research-ready global marine (and inland waters) data and metadata resulting from oceanographic research. The repository employs leading standards, practices and technologies to increase the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIRness) of its provisioned data and to federate its content with other data infrastructures across relevant domains. Broader impact activities include the curation of an openly-accessible catalog that facilitates reuse for research, education, resource management. The development of the BCO-DMO system, including related resources, enables discovery and integration of diverse datasets to achieve a deeper understanding of complex ocean ecological and biogeochemical systems necessary to address global scale interdisciplinary challenges. Educational activities, such as software carpentry and hack-a-thon events, are planned to leverage opportunistic venues to engage undergraduate students and early career researchers, training them in good data practices and the use of computational notebooks for open science while providing real-world data exposure. These experiences also provide an opportunity to improve the quality of metadata within the BCO-DMO database while fostering a more data savvy oceanographic research workforce. BCO-DMO is providing data management services to the oceanographic research community while making focused technological improvements throughout the data life cycle that are greatly advancing operational efficiency, improving end-user experience, and facilitating synthesis science. Objectives include: 1) continuing the core mission data management services for NSF Biological and Chemical Oceanography and Office of Polar Programs projects, 2) optimizing the efficiency of data management operations, 3) developing outreach and education efforts that promote data reuse and interest in oceanographic science, and 4) improving discoverability and interoperability of the BCO-DMO catalog for reuse. The project is also engaging in cyberinfrastructure research to evaluate the application of technologies, standards and leading practices to improve the management and provision of oceanographic data and information. The project is exploring multi-faceted applications of AI aimed at streamlining data sharing, discovery and access, enabling researchers to document their own data for sharing, locate data of interest, and incorporate desired data into automated research workflows more effectively. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.