The Laboratory Research Centre Ltd. is in charge of the long-term monitoring of the chemical parameters of the sea water within the seashore area City of Poti, Georgia. Together with the bacteriological lab, the chemical lab carries out analysis of drinking, surface, and waste waters.
As EMODnet Data Ingestion ambassador, the Tbilisi State University (TSU) established the first contact with the Laboratory Research Centre in Autumn 2017. The actual submission of chemical data to EMODnet started the same year and is still ongoing. The success of this permanent collaboration is due to a tailor-made procedure supported using the Georgian language throughout the contacts with the data provider, and to the continuous support from MARIS and the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research to the TSU. The use of the local language with the data provider helped a lot in understanding the technical processes and facilitating training in data publishing.
In the preparatory phase, a questionnaire was sent to establish a comprehensive list of marine-oriented institutions in the Black Sea, and to establish their capacities to obtain and process marine data. The value of data sharing was then explained to data holders; they were informed of the requirements of the EMODnet project and offer was made to participate to the project as data providers. Specific roles were distributed among the TSU staff to carry out the ingestion tasks. One person was designated to work with potential data holders on site, another was designated to serve as data centre contact person. The TSU programmer was involved in the work of processing the datasets during Phase II. All the TSU team members followed the procedure for testing the submission service.
