The Data Working Group met last week to discuss recent additions to the West Coast Ocean Data Portal  including new data sources from NOAA, USGS, Cal State University Monterey Bay, and Oregon Spatial Data Library. The working group also discussed the process of QAQC for new entries in the Portal. This involves data providers reviewing their data in the WCODP and verifying its accuracy and content.

Additionally, as we prepare for the launch of our data viewer in Summer, working group members are busy developing web services and adding those relevant URLs to the existing metadata records in the Portal. It’s tedious work, but it will help ensure that data is discoverable and viewable for users to the site.

Finally, a working group member brought up the topic of data management plans for their organization and asked if other groups had formally developed these workflows and strategies from storage and archiving to publishing and sharing. A few resources were discussed including,

California Digital Library Data Management Plan Tool – https://dmp.cdlib.org/

West Coast Ocean Data Portal Data Sharing Best Practices Guide – http://www.westcoastoceans.org/media/Data_Network_ACT/WestCoastOceanDataSharingBestPracticesandPolicies.pdf

If you have other examples and templates to share please mention them in the comments section.