Blue-cloud DAB: developing a platform to harmonize, assess and disseminate marine metadata collections

Abstract The integration and harmonization of marine data from diverse sources are vital for advancing global oceanographic research and ensuring seamless discovery and access of critical datasets. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the metadata harmonization efforts within the Blue-cloud 2026 project, which brokers data from numerous Blue Data Infrastructures (BDIs), leveraging the Discovery and Access Broker technology. The platform enables discovery and analysis of marine data collections while facilitating interoperability with other components of the marine digital ecosystem, such as virtual laboratories and the Semantic Analyzer. It also supports the flow of Blue-cloud information to other initiatives like the Global Earth Observations System of Systems. For data managers, the findings emphasize the importance of enhancing metadata quality, revealing discrepancies in core metadata elements, and the need for more consistent use of controlled vocabularies. For cyberinfrastructure developers, the study details the challenges of accommodating a wide array of interfaces from different data systems, highlighting the adoption of an extensible brokering architecture that harmonizes metadata models and protocols. The study also emphasizes the importance of metadata analysis in ensuring effective searches for end users, highlighting challenges in aggregating diverse sources, where data providers may have structured the content with different objectives compared to those of the system of systems. End users will gain insights into the current metadata content of Blue-cloud, enabling them to search and access data from multiple BDIs with an understanding of the technical complexities behind the scenes.