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Project Goal
Annually the Marine Institute collects a wealth of scientific data regarding Ireland’s marine environment from a wide variety of onshore and offshore data acquisition systems, such as the marine data buoy and research vessel mounted sensors. These datasets cover diverse themes including, oceanographic, environmental, biological and chemical data. The aim of this Marine Data Repository project is to build a single data warehouse to integrate, manage and support the analysis of this range of scientific data, faciliating the dissemination of information essential to the sustainable management of the Irelands marine resource. The Marine Data Repository goes live in July 2005.
Funding for the work has been provided by the Information Society, established by the Irish government to support the development of electronic services to the public.
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Business Problem Solved
A range of scientific programmes have been operational within the Marine Institute for more than a decade, but it was recognised that full scientific value was not being realised from these datasets, given the fragmented approach to data management. This project was initiated with the purpose of delivering information to stakeholders in a more holistic manner, in order to support the sustainable development of Irelands marine resources.
The Marine Data Repository will allow researchers to submit queries that require access to multiple thematic data sets across a range of data sources. An example might be to find all recordings of temperature in a particular geographic area. Currently such a query involves laboriously extracting data from each of the individual data sets requiring further processing and analysis. Once the Marine Data Repository goes live the researcher will be able to create a single map-based query which will deliver all the necessary data in a single transaction. Over time, as more analysis is conducted on these “raw” datasets, it is envisaged that more complex queries will be supported by the system, for example what would be the effects of sea temperature fluctuations on fish stocks in a particular geographic area.
Technology Implemented
Given the spatial nature of all scientific data collected, GIS was identified as central to this project. Working jointly with ESRI Ireland, a prototype data warehouse was initially developed to demonstrate the feasibility of managing such large volumes of spatial information. Based on this success, the Institute decided to build a fully functional data warehouse that will initially hold an estimated 30 million records of marine data.
The new system is built using ESRI’s Spatial Database Engine (ArcSDE) to store and retrieve information from a Microsoft SQL Server database. Various database design options were assessed by the project team and based on this evaluation, the ESRI-sponsored Marine Data Model was selected for use and extension in the project. This is one of a number of international development of industry-standard data models for GIS.
ESRI Ireland is currently developing a customised browser-based map interface to run on the Institute’s intranet using ESRI’s Internet map Server (ArcIMS). The Marine Institute is building the spatial data warehouse and developing the workstreams to ensure continuous loading of data from the diverse sources within the organisation.
Development Team Biography
The Marine Institute has led this project, working in partnership with ESRI Ireland, under a subcontract to Fujitsu Services, the Marine Institute’s strategic IT partner.
Martina Hennessy has led the Marine Institute team as project manager, with Damian Smyth, platform specialist, and Trevor Alcorn, GIS analyst, core members of the team involved throughout. Eamonn Doyle, Principal Consultant at ESRI Ireland, has played a central role in providing technical direction for the work, ably supported by a development team within ESRI Ireland.
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