Interoperable Ocean Observing using Archetypes: A use-case based evaluation

This paper presents a use-case based evaluation of the impact of two-level modeling on the automatic federation of ocean observational data. The goal of the work is to increase the interoperability and data quality of aggregated ocean observations to support convenient discovery and consumption by applications. An assessment of the interoperability of served data flows from publicly available ocean observing spatial data infrastructures was performed. Barriers to consumption of existing standards-compliant ocean-observing data streams were examined, including the impact of adherence to agreed data standards. Historical data flows were mapped to a set of archetypes and a backward integration experiment was performed to assess the incremental benefit of using two level models to federate data streams. The outcome of the evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of building a two-level model based ocean observing system using a combination of existing open source components, the adaptation of existing standards and the development of new software tools. The automatic integration of data flows becomes possible. This technique also allows real-time applications to automatically discover and federate newly discovered data flows and observations.