10 November 2023 MEDIN: New UK Contribution to the UN Ocean Decade

The Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) is a collaborative UK network established in 2008 and hosted at the National Oceanography Centre. This month, MEDIN has taken the exciting step to make all the data described on its centralised web portal accessible to the UN Ocean Decade digital infrastructure, OceanInfoHub https://oceaninfohub.org/. 

This greatly enhances the findability of UK marine data and supports MEDIN’s ethos of ‘measure once, use many times.’ This is the culmination of several months’ collaboration between MEDIN and the Ocean InfoHub team to make UK metadata compatible with the requirements for the international, federated system underpinning Ocean InfoHub.

Thanks to the hard work of many MEDIN partners, particularly the Data Archive Centres, the metadata is rich in content and available in several interoperable formats. Having previously exposed UK metadata in the format required for Google Dataset Search, only minor modifications were required to add all 17,565 of UK metadata records to the Ocean InfoHub web portal. This milestone makes MEDIN the biggest contributor to this globally important digital infrastructure to date and is another example of MEDIN providing global leadership in this area.