Principal Investigator (PI): Robert Raskin, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On-line oceanographic mission data sets are published by numerous state, federal and international data centers typically with disparate software interfaces and information models by which to query and retrieve information.

The process of coordination, search, and discovery of these data sets has become increasingly burdensome and it is time consuming and costly to locate and extract data and metadata from unfamiliar data sources.

The development of a unified, systematic approach for searching, indexing and discovering oceanographic data sets and their respective metadata across organizations can do much to alleviate the time and complexity costs borne by data users.

We will develop a Virtual Oceanographic Data Center (VODC) as a "one-stop" Internet presence for searching, extracting, and fusing data from oceanographic data sources.

We will apply the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) middleware (2003 Runner-up NASA Software of the Year) to develop a standards-based integrated catalog of oceanographic data.