Author:   Ines Hessler – Senior Data Manager

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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