The value of standards is clearly demonstrable; we need only look to the manufacturing sector to see their value. In oceanography, there have been many discussions and solutions for processing data and information. Many useful ideas, each a solution to an immediate problem, have been developed and put into practice, but there have been few successful attempts to develop and implement international standards in managing data. In the past decades IODE has made a number of attempts to agree on data management standards (e.g. MEDI and mXML for marine metadata). However these attempts were not successful, possibly due to insufficient coordination with other similar initiatives. Read More
