D2.9 Prioritised inventory of unavailable data sources

DTO-BioFlow aims to target current challenges in the accessibility, collection and harmonization of data.  This deliverable addresses the accessibility element, identifying and prioritizing currently unavailable datasets and potential data sources for ingestion to primary and secondary integrators that will connect to the Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) data repositories.  The outcomes of this deliverable will inform the second data grants call for the subsequent evaluation of the data call.  An initial list of 436 data sources were collated from the European Directory of Ocean Observing Systems (EDIOS) and the UNESCO’s GOOS Bio Eco Portal, and additional sources identified by other DTO-Bioflow work packages as inaccessible and required for their tasks. The initial assessment of inaccessibility for these datasets came across limitations such as slight differences in spelling or wording of the titles of datasets. In some cases, this made it unclear whether these are actually accessible via integrators such as EurOBIS, or if they are subsets or different versions of the available datasets.  This led to a second accessibility assessment which incorporated information from anywhere in the metadata rather than just titles to determine if datasets were accessible.  The resulting list of 303 inaccessible datasets, i.e. data not available for users to find and access or download, has been prioritized by using a scoring system based on a set of criteria including spatial coverage, taxonomic coverage, variables measured, the type of data, whether they are a time series and whether they are required internally by DTO work packages to conduct their work within the DTO BioFlow project.  This list can be downloaded from the DTO-Bioflow website.  The prioritisation process identified 40 high-priority datasets which should be the initial targets for data mobilisation efforts, including 15 datasets specifically identified and required by WP3 of DTO-BioFlow. In addition to the prioritisation, the inventory lists necessary metadata to ease the mobilisation of datasets into the DTO to ‘unlock’ these datasets and make them available.