LAC OCEAN INFOHUB

OIH: OCEAN INFOHUB

 

The Ocean InfoHub (OIH) facilitates access to global oceans information, data and knowledge products for management and sustainable development. The OIH links and anchors a growing network of regional and thematic nodes that will improve online access to, and synthesis of existing global, regional and national data, information and knowledge resources, including existing clearinghouse mechanisms. The project is not establishing a new database, but will be supporting discovery and interoperability of existing information systems through the development of a lightweight Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS) architecture. This enables users from Member States and other partners to discover data, data products, data services, information products and services. The OIH Project is a three-year project funded by the Government of Flanders, Kingdom of Belgium, and implemented by the IODE Project Office of the IOC/UNESCO.

 

The OIH Project commenced in April 2020. Three regional communities of practice (Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Pacific Small Island Developing States) were established with coordinators and technical representatives on the overall OIH Technical Working Group. These three regional groups have developed considerably over the past year, with new regional partners, and will continue to expand and evolve, feeding end-user needs into the ODIS-architecture development process. With additional co-funding during 2022, three more nodes will be supported, in partnership with National Oceanographic Data Centres in Africa and Asia. A pilot portal will also be established for Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction.

 

OIH: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Region

 

The Ocean InfoHub Project is working in three pilot regions, of which the Latin America and the Caribbean Region is one. The Project is working with the IOC/UNESCO IOCARIBE Secretariat, together with partners, and has been actively working on identifying early stage partners who are ready to test the ODIS-architecture proof-of-concept. A number of events and meetings have taken place to raise awareness of the project in the LAC region, and to bring new partners into the co-design process.

 

The IOC Ocean Infohub has been formally requested by IOCARIBE Recommendation SC-IOCARIBE-XV.1: IOC New Capacity Development Strategy: Implementation Plan “Urges IOCARIBE Member States to:…(iv) Actively participate in the further development and management of the IOC Clearing-House Mechanism for the Transfer of Marine Technology (CHM/TMT)”

 

Based on this, INVEMAR (Colombia) developed a pilot CHM for the Latin America and Caribbean region, in the context of the Caribbean Marine Atlas (CMA-II) project.

 

The pilot “Clearing-House Mechanism LAC ” is a hybrid model, with a centralized portal that provides access to information sources identified by the users as most relevant (Databases on Training and Education resources, List of experts, Research vessels,..) and integrated from a number of existing web sources developed and maintained under IOC (OceanExpert, Ocean Teacher Global Academy, ODISCat and others).

 

Clearing-House Mechanism LAC