UNEP/GRID-Arendal launches OCEANIDS

Last week the tremendous team at the United Nations Environment Programme GRID-Arendal launched their OCEANIDS tool. Focused on sharing and open access to rich scientific data, the team is using GeoIQ to engage with citizens, governments, and researchers around the world to collaborate on important issues in the marine environment.

“OCEANIDS [is] a new tool to find and examine public marine-related scientific datasets. A main aim in the development of OCEANIDS is to provide end users with an interdisciplinary and multi-thematic geospatial and metadata portal of public data and information – but with the non-GIS expert end user in mind.”

The OCEANIDS portal is a custom designed version of the same platform behind GeoCommons, providing a focused experience around ocean data. However, users can still leverage the almost 100,000 public datasets in GeoCommons through our open data federation. Searching in OCEANIDS, users can optionally choose to import and link data from GeoCommons to compare it with the UNEP/GRID-Arendal scientific data.

Through our work with UNEP/GRID-Arendal, we also extended GeoIQ to include some interesting new features. Particular to oceanographic is support for North and South Polar projections. Scientific data that analyzes ice shelves, shipping routes, or Antarctica can be appropriately visualized.

As part of the launch, UNEP/GRID-Arendal has made an open call for anyone to create maps with the public scientific datas. The first deadline for submission of maps/stories is the 5 March 2012.

We’re excited to be an integral part of not just opening up access to the incredibly valuable, credible scientific data, but also providing tools that anyone can use to work with the data, ask questions, and share their insights.