Project overview
SEA-SEARCH (2002 - 2005) was an EU funded project involving a network of 33 national oceanographic data centres and marine information services from 30 coastal states. Each SEA-SEARCH partner is specialised in managing and distributing oceanographic and marine data.
Enormous investments are made in Europe in marine data acquisition for the European seas and attached open ocean waters. However, no optimal use could be made of these investments and resources because of
- lack of awareness of existing data
- incompatibility and disparity between data sets
- differences in quality assurance standards
- limited access to data
- differences in, or even lack of, data management methodologies
The primary goal of SEA-SEARCH was to alleviate these problems by providing users with a central overview and access to ocean and marine data and information in a wider Europe.
Together the SEA-SEARCH partners developed a number of inventories and overviews. These included
- Common Data Index (CDI) — a pilot system providing users with a public internet tool to search for up-to-date information about marine data currently held in individual partners' databases.
- European Directory of Marine Environmental Data (EDMED) — hosted on the BODC web site and maintained by BODC.
- Cruise Summary Reports — based on ROSCOP, which is a global standard for indexing oceanographic cruises by research vessels. BODC is responsible for collating Cruise Summary Reports for UK research cruises.
- European Directory of Marine Environmental Research Projects (EDMERP).
- EC Marine Research Projects.
The SEA-SEARCH project ended in 2005. The above services are now being developed further by the EU SeaDataNet project.
