EMODnet was established on the principles that there was a lot of public sector data available that was not used adequately to underpin decision making in support of commercial and policy objectives across Europe. This situation persisted at a national level, but compounded at the international level where it was practically impossible for organisations to use marine environmental data across and between member states. In the scope of the North Sea check point, the literature review examines if this is still the case following ten years operation of the EMODnet and Copernicus programmes, with a focus on commercial and non-governmental users.
The literature survey considered public reports, journal papers, grey literature and web published articles and used the Mendeley tool to collate and discuss the findings. In total 50 documents were reviewed. Based on an analysis of the documents, we are still very much at the ‘Wild West’ stage of the Blue Economy when it comes to data provision across the North Sea. If you know where to look, you could probably find the data you need, but it is not a case of ‘Google, click, download’. Services that deliver data are increasing and some are maturing, however the vast majority would not be considered as ‘trusted providers’ or the ‘go to’ place for data. Indeed many are not discoverable via web searches either. Furthermore data portals or independent literature do not give widespread information on the value of the data for a particular use. In most cases it is incumbent on the user to download the data and then make assessment as to its value.
The Blue Economy comprises many actors and there is a desire to re-use data beyond its original collection intent, especially where the original collection was publicly funded. The key value add of public services like EMODnet is in providing data custodianship, version control and flexible download services. Allocating resources to these tasks should be seen as a priority over creating new data products and services that widen the gap between data ‘as collected’ and data ‘as provided’.
The overall aim of the literature survey is to identify and report on the contents of the documentation available on the adequacy and data available for the North Sea basin and summarise findings of existing studies. Data adequacy in the context of this literature survey means how easily the literature was discovered, accessed and how much it provided information on providing data to users.
In summary, the literature survey is designed to have a symbiotic relationship with the data challenges, providing background information for the challenges while expecting the result from each of the challenges to build upon the results of the literature survey.