The H2020 project MINKE integrates key European marine metrology research infrastructures to propose an innovative “oceanographic data quality” framework for European stakeholders monitoring and managing marine ecosystems. MINKE proposes a new vision for the design of marine monitoring networks. It considers accuracy and completeness as the driving components of quality in data acquisition. This new vision is framed in a helix model of innovation that incorporates all the elements involved in the monitoring network design:

• Context (ocean health): identifying the Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) as the key parameters to monitor
• Civil society (NGOs, maker communities, social media and Citizen Science platforms): key actors to ensure data integrity
• Academia: researching new methods to ensure the accuracy and the global quality of the final products, developing tools to integrate information from high quality oceanographic instruments and low-cost instrumentation
• Industry: improving the performance of the observations with new instrumentation, data transmission systems and cost-effective technologies
• Governments: providing the legal and socio-economic framework for the development of the proposed network

52°North co-leads a dedicated work package on data harmonization. The core topics of this work package include the evaluation of interoperability standards, the investigation of integration options for the European Open Science Cloud, the handling of uncertainty information, as well as the connection to data aggregation platforms such as EMODNET.

In 2023, 52°North’s team focused on aspects related to data harmonization. In a dedicateddeliverable, 52°North developed best practices for publishing MINKE metadata and data sets in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) using platforms such as Zenodo and Seanoe.