The U.S. GLOBEC (GLOBal Ocean ECosystems Dynamics) Program is designed to address the question of how global climate change may affect the distribution, abundance, and production of animals in the sea. The U.S. GLOBEC Georges Bank Program uses the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) data management system to support our data management needs. We require physical and biological data and information to be made available to our distributed scientific investigators in a timely basis. These investigators are currently located in 24 different institutions, throughout Canada and the United States (see Figure 1). The JGOFS Data Management System uses standard World Wide Web (WWW) clients (such as Netscape, Mosaic, and Internet Explorer) and the hypertext transmission protocol (http) to serve data and information to all types of computing platforms. The JGOFS system uses a data object paradigm to allow numeric, image, video, and text-based data to be accessed over the Internet. A standard set of plotting tools is available for basic x-y and map plots. Also, the system can reformat and download the numerical data into "flat files" for subsequent analysis by other tools such as Matlab. The system is currently serving the following types of data: along track (sea surface sensors); biological sample counts; modeling results; drifter images and movies; digital values and 3-D perspective curtain plot of acoustic volume back scattering; and images of analyzed results.
The JGOFS software is freely available over the Internet via our home page (URL: http://globec.whoi.edu/) and has been ported to HP, IBM, IRIX, OSF, Solaris and SunOS Unix-based systems. We will soon have a version for PC/Windows 3.11 as well.
The system is flexible, data driven, extensible and network accessible. It is used by both the JGOFS and U.S. GLOBEC Georges Bank Programs to provide access to our data. We are each able to implement our own data policies using the same JGOFS software. A detailed description of the JGOFS architecture can be found in (JGOFS Data System Overview, Flierl, et. al.) and is available on-line at http://lake.mit.edu/datasys/jgsys.html. A description of the GLOBEC use of this data management system is available in Groman and Wiebe, in press, and on line at http://globec.whoi.edu/globec-dir/reports/groman/Hamburg1996.talk/hamburg-text.html.
Groman, Robert C. and Peter H. Wiebe, Management of Biological, Physical, and Chemical Data Within the U.S. GLOBEC Program, in Proceedings of the NODC/IOC Chemical and Biological Data Management Workshop, Hamburg, German, May
20-23, 1996, in press.
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