MERIDIAN (Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data
Integration and Application Network) successfully launched in November
2017. MERIDIAN is a Canada Foundation for Innovation funded
multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary consortium of ocean
researchers, computer and data management professionals. Our team
members are based at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University
of Victoria, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
University, all located in British Columbia, as well as the Université
du Québec à Rimouski in Québec. For more information about our team
please visit ‘Meet our team’.
MERIDIAN’s vision is to
Enhance Canada’s leadership in the ocean data integration, management
and analysis by creating a world-class infrastructure, based on human
resources and computing, to increase the data’s value and visibility.
MERIDIAN’s mission is
To assist the ocean data community in the use of data science
technologies to discover, access, analyse and visualize marine data.
MERIDIAN will provide ocean data management expertise to ensure that
data are well described, discoverable, accessible and reusable.
We are addressing our vision and will fulfil our mission by
consolidating ocean acoustic and AIS (Automatic Identification System)
data sets, improve their discoverability and reusability, and establish a
national data resource for noise in the ocean. The research data
infrastructure will consist of a Data Discovery Service, a software
portal, data products, algorithms, web interfaces, data management
policies and best practise guides.
The MERIDIAN Data Discovery Service will make finding, accessing and
reusing acoustic data easy by linking their rich metadata to the
original data sources at research institutions, government agencies and
private companies. We are also developing open-source (Big) data
analysis and visualization software solutions for academic, government
and industry stakeholders, as well as other interested individuals. The
related software platform will be hosted on the Compute Canada cloud and
will support interactive data visualization and data analysis for
streaming data.
In summary, MERIDIAN will enable Canada’s leading ocean researchers to
fully exploit Canada’s ocean data, monitoring trends in the state of the
ocean acoustic environment, and enable more timely, effective and
efficient protection of valued marine species and protected areas.
If you would like to make your ocean acoustic dataset discoverable
through the MERIDIAN Discovery Service but your data are not yet stored
on a permanent and sustainable data repository please contact us to discuss possible storage options.
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