Geo-Seas - a pan-European infrastructure for the management of
marine geological and geophysical data
C. Graham1, D. Schaap2, P. Diviacco3, H. Glaves4
1
BGS, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
2
MARIS, Voorburg, The Netherlands
3
OGS, Trieste, Italy
4
BGS, Keyworth Nottingham, United Kingdom
The Geo-Seas project is an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) of the Research
Infrastructures programme within EU FP7. It began on 1st May 2009 and will be
completed by 31st October 2012. The overall objective of the project is to build and
deploy a pan-European infrastructure for accessing marine geoscientific data. Such data
are essential for economic activities, for scientific research, and for the planning and
management of the seas and their resources.
Economic examples are cable and pipeline laying, sand and gravel extraction,
hydrocarbon exploration and production, and offshore power generation. Scientific
examples are the study of climate change, and the environmental impact of
anthropogenic activities, such as pollution. Management examples are the sustainable
exploitation of resources and environmental protection.
Despite there being a large volume of geological and geophysical data available for the
marine environment, it is currently difficult to search for, and use the data in an
integrated way. This is due to differences in metadata standards, nomenclatures,
formats, levels of aggregation and coordinate systems employed by the many data
holding organisations, the existence of many discovery metadata portals at the local
level (both organisational and national), and the wide variety of access and use policies.
This makes searching for, and accessing the data difficult and time consuming. It also
hampers making use of the data to develop trans-national, data products and services.
Previous EU-funded projects made progress in addressing these issues. The existing
EU-SEASED metadata service, compiled from the outputs of the EuroCore, EU-Marsin
and EuroSeismic, projects, provides a basic non-ISO compliant inventory of seabed
cores and seismic surveys. This is currently the best available common metadata
catalogue. In addition the SEISCAN and SEISCANEX projects scanned, digitised and
indexed legacy seismic records. The Geo-Seas project will use the outputs from these
projects as the starting point for its development work.
The Geo-Seas data infrastructure will comprise a network of twenty six European
marine geoscience data centres from seventeen coastal countries in Europe. These data
centres include national geological surveys and marine research institutes.
Geo-Seas will allow data users to locate, assess the quality of, and acquire harmonised
and federated marine geological and geophysical data and data products held by the
project data centres through the Geo-Seas data portal. Examples of the types of
geological and geophysical data included in the project are raw observational and
analytical data, as well as the derived and processed data products from visual
observations, seabed sediment samples, boreholes, geophysical surveys (seismic,
gravity etc), side-scan sonar surveys and multibeam surveys. All of these data types
compliment each other, and all are necessary to produce a complete characterisation and
interpretation of the geology of the seabed and the sub-surface.
The project will underpin European directives such as INSPIRE, as well as recent
framework programmes on both the global and European scales, for example, GEOSS
and GMES, all of which are intended to encourage the exchange of data and
information. There is an emphasis in the project of interoperability, with other closely
related disciplines, for example, oceanography, as well as with other key framework
projects including the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODNet)
and One Geology – Europe.
Common standards for the management and cataloguing of data will be implemented
across all of the data centres. Appropriate existing standards will be adopted and new
ones developed as required. Geo-Seas is liaising with industry bodies on standards, for
example, the OGP Surveying and Positioning Committee and the SEG. To ensure
interoperability with other marine environmental data, ISO, OGC and GeoSciML
standards will be used as the basis for the metadata profiles for the geological and
geophysical data. Other marine geological and geophysical organisations will be
encouraged to adopt the protocols, standards and tools resulting from the project.
New data products and services will also be developed, following consultation with the
various communities of data users on their current and future requirements. An example
is a viewing service for seismic reflection data. The responses to a user questionnaire
disseminated throughout Europe are currently being analysed.
The pre-existing EU-SEASED and SEISCANEX metadata catalogues will be upgraded
and imported into the Geo-Seas metadatabase. The SEISCANEX data centres will
become nodes in the Geo-Seas network, thus making this valuable data resource more
widely available to the user community. Users will be able to download images of the
seismic data as well as selected images for conversion to SEG-Y format, which can then
be reprocessed and merged with more modern digital data sets. The SEISCANEX
archive will also be improved. Digital navigation files will be generated for the seismic
data. Currently there is navigation information available, but this is not always in a
standard ASCII format.
Marine geology and geophysics is multidisciplinary in that it overlaps the traditional
geoscientific and oceanographic discipline boundaries. Relevant data are acquired,
processed, interpreted and stored by organisations in both disciplines. The
oceanographic community in Europe is already developing a European oceanographic
data infrastructure through the SeaDataNet project. Because of this pre-existing
development, and the overlap in the disciplines, the Geo-Seas project is adopting the
SeaDataNet methodologies, including its architecture and middleware components,
where appropriate, to interconnect the marine geological and geophysical data centres.
The SeaDataNet metadata standard profile (Common Data Index or CDI), which is itself
based upon the ISO19115 standard, will be modified to accommodate the requirements
of the Geo-Seas project. This will facilitate the integration of the marine geological and
geophysical datasets with other oceanographic data sets, which are managed by the
SeaDataNet data centres. This will not only avoid unnecessary duplication of effort
within the project where there are pre-existing technologies, but it will also facilitate
multidisciplinary searching and use of oceanographic and marine geoscientific data.
Some organisations are partners in both projects.
Metadata for the Geo-Seas data portal will be compiled by the local data centres and
then harvested automatically by the centralised Geo-Seas metadatabase system. This
methodology will allow the metadatabase to be kept up-to-date with regular updates
being done effectively and efficiently.
There are also activities focussed on formats and vocabularies, which include
identifying and implementing synergies with the GeoSciML project, the objective of
which is to develop an international standard for geoscience data interoperability, as
well as with One-Geology-Europe and EMODNet.
Geo-Seas data products will include maps, and it is envisaged that there will be an
exchange and integration of these map products with those of other EU-funded projects
particularly One-Geology – Europe, which is developing a digital geological map of
Europe, and EMODNet which will be serving out seabed maps for several European sea
regions using the One Geology – Europe portal services. This will in turn enhance the
potential for interoperability between these and other projects and also facilitate a
multidisciplinary approach to ocean science within Europe.
Geo-Seas consortium partners:
NERC-BGS (United Kingdom), NERC-BODC (United Kingdom), NERC-NOCS
(United Kingdom), MARIS (Netherlands), IFREMER (France), BRGM (France), TNO
(Netherlands), BSH (Germany), IGME (Spain), INETI (Portugal), IGME (Greece), GSI
(Ireland), BGR (Germany), OGS (Italy), GEUS (Denmark), NGU (Norway), PGI
(Poland), EGK (Estonia), LIGG (Lithuania), IO-BAS (Bulgaria), NOA (Greece), CIRIA
(United Kingdom), MUMM (Belgium), UB (Spain), UCC (Ireland), EU-Consult
(Netherlands), CNRS (France), SHOM (France), CEFAS (United Kingdom), and LU
(Latvia).
The project is coordinated by the British Geological Survey (BGS), while the technical
coordination is performed by Marine Information Service (MARIS).