Chapter Four - A collaborative framework among data producers, managers, and users

The needs of society and the emerging blue economy require access and integration of data and information for the construction of dedicated products. A “transparent and accessible ocean” is one of the key objectives of the Ocean Decade 2021–30. In this context, marine infrastructures become significant components of a global knowledge environment, enabling environmental assessment and providing the necessary data for scientifically valid actions to protect and restore ocean health, to use marine resources in a sustainable way. The data is collected, analyzed, organized, and used by people and their good use/reuse can be obtained with social practices, technological and physical agreements aimed at facilitating collaborative knowledge, decision-making, inference. The vision is a digital ocean data ecosystem made up of multiple, interoperable, and scalable components. The huge amount of data and the resulting products can drive the development of new knowledge as well as new applications and services. Predictive capabilities that derive from the digital ecosystem enable the implementation of services for real-time decision-making, multihazard warning systems, and advance marine space planning. The chapter develops following the progressive complexity and information content of products deriving from oceanic data: data cycle and data collections, data products, oceanic reanalysis. The chapter discusses the new challenges of data products and the complexity of deriving them.