CDI Landing Page
The SeaDataNet Common Data Index (CDI) service gives users a highly detailed insight in the availability and geographical spreading of marine data sets that are managed by more than 100 marine and oceanographic data centres, located in 34 countries, around and riparian to European seas. Moreover, it provides unique interfaces for humans and machines for requesting access, and if granted, for downloading subsets from the rich and steadily increasing volume of marine data sets for physics, chemistry, geology, biology, geophysics, and bathymetry that these distributed data centres are managing. Currently, the CDI service gives access to more than 2.8 million metadata records and associated data sets, in majority available in SeaDataNet standard data formats and using the SeaDataNet controlled vocabularies for many aspects.
CDI offers two types of service interfaces:
- A regular user interface for human users.
- Various M2M (machine to machine) interfaces for machine users.
User Interface
The CDI V5 service provides powerful search options by combining full free-text search, facet search and geographic search options, powered by Elastic Search, SQL search, and GeoServer. In addition, users are provided with an integrated and effective data shopping, tracking and download service mechanism which gives a unique and harmonised access to the data sets, that are managed and contributed by the connected data centres.
The CDI service has been adopted by several European projects and drives the data search and access in multiple EMODnet portals. More data centres from Europe are invited to connect, this way increasing and expanding the availability of marine and ocean data sets for physics, biology, chemistry, marine litter, geology, geophysics, and bathymetry.
Machine to machine (M2M) interfaces
SeaDataNet offers three services that provide access to the CDI metadata and data access:
- An API for M2M access to the CDI Discovery & Access system.
- A SPARQL endpoint for discovery of the CDI metadata in RDF. (with references to other SeaDataNet metadata RDF)
- WMS and WFS services for displaying the CDI dataset locations in external map interfaces.
For accessing the API, and more information about the method please find more details per service below.
CDI API
The SeaDataNet CDI API is the machine accessible option for ordering and downloading datasets: https://cdi-open.seadatanet.org/api
As the URL indicated it allows access to only open (= CCBY) licensed datasets that are accessible via the cloud, and therefore the performance for accessing the data is fast and stable. The API is fully documented in Swagger. The dialogue itself is similar to the human user interface, see illustration below.
The API is currently in use by EMODnet Biology for harvesting periodically CDI marine biodiversity datasets.
How to get access?
If you are interested to make use of the API, please contact info@maris.nl to request an account and receive further details and support. For the account, make sure to have an active Marine-ID account (an account that has created a dataorder in the CDI before).
SPARQL Endpoint
The SPARQL endpoint follows the W3C rules and allows data to be harvested and indexed by machines applications like search engines. On the SPARQL endpoints webpage you will find the references to documentation how to use it.
WMS/WFS Services
SeaDataNet offers also OGC compliant WMS and WFS services to view the locations (and some basic metadata, plus URL to more details) of the CDI metadata catalogue. The following URL’s offers access to the services:
More details about the CDI service
How to contribute?