DAMAR: Information management system for marine data

Since 1994 the Data Centre of the Spanish Oceanographic Institute develops a system for archiving and quality control of oceanographic data. The work started in the frame of the European Marine Science & Technology Programme (MAST) when a consortium of several Mediterranean Data Centres began to work on the MEDATLAS project. Along the years, old software modules for MS DOS were rewritten, improved and migrated to Windows environment. Oceanographic data quality control includes now not only vertical profiles (mainly CTD and bottles observations) but also time series of currents and sea level observations. New powerful routines for analysis and for graphic visualization were added. Data presented originally in ASCII format were organized recently in an open source MySQL database. Nowadays, the IEO, as part of SeaDataNet Pan-european Infrastructure for ocean and marine data management, has designed and developed a new information system, consistent with the ISO 19115 and SeaDataNet standards, in order to manage the large and diverse marine data and information originated in Spain by different sources. To optimize the system and considering storage capability and speed response, a mixed system has been designed, in which the metadata and some type of data are structured in a relational database, and some other type of data are structured in files. Normally, data type with a wide range of parameters but not too much data, as nutrients, pollutants and any other sample measurements is stored within the relational database. On the other hand, data type with few parameters but a huge volume of data as ADCP, CTD and any other sensor is stored in binary or ASCII files.