Meeting of the Data Management Team of OceanSITES in conjunction with IMDIS 2010. Ms Hester Viola represented the Panel at the meeting. The Data Management Team meeting expressed the goals of the meeting from the outset in order to prioritise the important decisions to be made as a group. The meeting focused on the status and role of the Data Assembly Centers and their progress in providing data and metadata to the GDACs. Each DAC provided a status report. The Data management team had begun holding monthly teleconferences in early 2010 which helped DACs and GDACs to make progress on implementing the data system. Ms Viola presented the OceanSITES project office update (including some information about DBCP status and JCOMMOPS). The data (NetCDF) format, directory structure and file naming conventions, had been discussed during the telephone meetings, however specific concerns and enhancements to the format were discussed and agreed to by the team of particular concern were the quality control flags to be adopted and vocabularies for multi-disciplinary parameters which had not been dealt with in the past. The team discussed progress towards defining a standard SensorML format, used to describe the necessary metadata, based on work completed by IFREMER. NOAA presented on using the existing NetCDF files to automatically generate metadata records, based on work completed by NOAA. WHOI presented on adopting Ontologies and Vocabularies for OceanSITES, on behalf of the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discussed the implementation of metadata elements to track the lineage of data sets. The GDAC managers presented the proposed structure and process for synchronizing between the two FTP sites. The process of archiving and preserving updated data was discussed, but not fully resolved, so the team decided to create a proposal for the Steering Team to review. There was some discussion about the web tools and products which might come out of the OceanSITES data system eventually, however the team agreed it was important to focus on developing the data on the FTP site as a priority with a stable structure. The team then discussed the site approval process adopted by the OceanSITES Steering Team and its impacts for data management. They then discussed the delayed mode data management processes in use and reviewed the Data Management and Quality Control documents available to them, some of which needed to be updated and reviewed. Throughout the meeting the team revisited its goals and ensured that they were being addressed as well as possible. Finally an action list was drafted and reviewed by the team. The meeting report is currently being reviewed, but will be available on the OceanSITES web site in June 2010 . Documents and Presentations from the meeting are available from the web site.

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