R2R+BCO-DMO - Linked Oceanographic Datasets

The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) and the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) program are two key data repositories for oceanographic research, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). R2R curates digital data and documentation generated by environmental sensor systems installed on vessels from the U.S. academic research fleet, with support from the NSF Oceanographic Technical Services and Arctic Research Logistics Programs. BCO-DMO human-curates and maintains data and metadata including biological, chemical, and physical measurements and results from projects funded by the NSF Biological Oceanography, Chemical Oceanography, and Antarctic Organisms & Ecosystems Programs. These two repositories have a strong connection, and document several thousand U.S. oceanographic research expeditions since the 1970’s. Recently, R2R and BCO-DMO have made their metadata collections available as Linked Data, accessible via public SPARQL endpoints. In this paper, we report on these datasets.