Accessing diverse data comprehensively – CODM, the COSYNA data portal

Abstract. The coastal observation system COSYNA aims to describe the physical and biogeochemical state of a regional coastal system. The COSYNA data management is the link between observations, model results and data usage. The challenge for the COSYNA data management CODM is the integration of diverse data sources in terms of parameters, dimensionality and observation methods to gain a comprehensive view of the observations. This is achieved by describing the data using metadata in a generic way and by making all gathered data available for different analyses and visualisations in an interrelated way, independent of data dimensionality. Different parameter names for the same observed property are mapped to the corresponding CF standard name Eaton et al. (2010) leading to standardised and comparable metadata. These metadata together with standardised web services are the base for the data portal. The URLs of these web services are also stored within the metadata as direct data access URLs, e.g. a map such as a GetMap request.