Welcome to the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service
The Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service is one of the two main components of the Blue-Cloud technical framework, next to the Blue Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE). It facilitates discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products for external users in stand-alone mode. Functionality to serve also users of the VRE through connectivity will be added soon. The Blue-Cloud data sets are managed in blue data infrastructures (BDIs) that are connected to the Blue Cloud service to serve federated discovery and access.
A common interface is provided for discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products from each of the federated BDIs. The interface also includes facilities for mapping and viewing the locations of data sets, as this is part of the query dialogue. Moreover, the interface has a shopping mechanism, facilitating users to compose and submit mixed shopping baskets with requests for data sets from multiple BDIs.
Note: creating an account and login at the MyBlueCloud dashboard is required for submitting shopping requests for data sets! Use is made of a D4Science account.
The Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service makes use of web services and APIs, following protocols such as CSW, OAI-PMH, ERDDAP, or otherwise, as provided and maintained by the BDIs. These are used to deploy machine-to-machine interactions for harvesting metadata, submitting queries, and retrieving resulting metadata, data sets and data products.
The query mechanism has a two-step approach:
- The first step enables users to identify interesting data collections, with free search, geographic and temporal criteria as main query operators on a common catalogue including entries from all federated BDIs;
- The second step enables users to drill down per interesting BDI to get more specific data sets at granule level, using again free search, geographic and temporal criteria, but this time at granule level, and including additional search criteria, specific for a selected BDI;
- Finally, users are able to compose and submit shopping requests at the granule level and after processing by the Blue-Cloud data broker to retrieve the data sets by downloading from their MyBlueCloud dashboard.
Currently, the following BDIs are federated in the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service:
| Blue Data Infrastructure | Types of data sets | Logo and link |
|---|
| SeaDataNet CDI service | Marine physics, bathymetry, chemistry, geology, geophysics, and biology observation data sets |  |
| EMODnet Chemistry data products | Marine chemistry data collections and interpolated map products |  |
| EurOBIS - EMODnet Biology | Marine biogeographic data collections with taxonomy and distribution |  |
| Euro-Argo and Argo GDAC | Ocean physics and marine biogeochemistry observation data from Argo floats |  |
| ELIXIR- European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) | Nucleotide sequencing data and information on marine species |  |
| EcoTaxa | Taxonomic annotation data of images on planktonic biodiversity |  |
| SeaDataNet data products | Aggregated marine data collections and climatologies, such as for Temperature & Salinity | |
| ICOS-Marine | Long-term oceanic observations of carbon uptake and fluxes for understanding the global carbon cycle |  |
| SOCAT - Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas | SOCAT version 2020 with quality-controlled surface ocean fCO2 measurements from 1957 to 2020 |  |
| EMODnet Bathymetry | EMODnet Bathymetry World Base Layer is used as base map in the interface | |
The ambition of Blue-Cloud is to connect more Blue Data Infrastructures in the near future.
