Arctic PASSION will primarily rely on self describing, standardised file formats for data encoding. These standardised formats also have semantic frameworks for annotation of the data. This simplifies integration of data across data providers and communities and is in line with efforts undertaken in large data exchange activities, like operational data exchange through the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) working with atmospheric, oceanographic and hydrological data and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
The specific standards that will be promoted by Arctic PASSION includes:
- CF-NetCDF
- NetCDF adhering to the Climate and Forecast Conventions is widely used, both in the oceanographic community, in the Earth System Grid Federation, in Copernicus services, by ESA and EUMETSAT for Sentinel data provision and WMO is developing WMO specific profiles of the standard. By adding the Attribute Convention for Dataset Discovery, discovery level metadata can be embedded in the datasets and extracted directly if served through e.g. OPeNDAP.
- Darwin Core Archive
- According to the Darwin Core Archive Assistant, Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) is a Biodiversity informatics data standard that makes use of the Darwin Core terms to produce a single, self contained dataset for species occurrence or taxonomic (species) data. It is the preferred format for publishing data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. You export your data as a set of one or more text (CSV) files. A simple XML descriptor file (called meta.xml) is required to inform others how your files are organized.
Data that doesn't fit into these categories will be accompanied by a detailed product manual providing guidance to data consumers.
These data will require some more human effort to utilise. Both CF and DwC-A standards are managed in well defined governance processes and the standards are used widely beyond the original user communities. The template for the product manual is to be developed.