Description: The Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) are the European umbrella regulations for water systems. It is a challenge for the scientific community to translate the principles of these directives into realistic and accurate approaches. The aim of this paper, conducted by the Benthos Ecology Working Group of ICES, is to describe how the principles have been translated, which were the challenges and best way forward. We have tackled the following principles: the ecosystem-based approach, the development of benthic indicators, the definition of ‘pristine’ or sustainable conditions, the detection of pressures and the development of monitoring programs. We concluded that testing and integrating the different approaches was facilitated during the WFD process, which led to further insights and improvements, which the MSFD can rely upon. Expert involvement in the entire implementation process proved to be of vital importance.

Description: The identity of authors and data providers is crucial for personalized interoperability. The marketplace of available identifiers is packed and the right choice is getting more and more complicated. Even though there are more then 15 different systems available there are still some under development and proposed to come up by the end of 2012 ('PubMed Central Author ID' and ORCID). Data Management on a scale beyond the size of a single research institute but on the scale of a scientific site including a university with student education program needs to tackle this problem and so did the Kiel Data Management an Infrastructure. The main problem with the identities of researchers is the quite high frequency changes in positions during a scientist life. The required system needed to be a system that already contained the potential of preregistered people with their scientific publications from other countries, institutions and organizations. Scanning the author ID marketplace brought up, that there us a high risk of additional workload to the researcher itself or the administration due to the fact that individuals need to register an ID for themselves or the chosen register is not yet big enough to simply find the right entry. On the other hand libraries deal with authors and their publications now for centuries and they have high quality catalogs with person identities already available. Millions of records internationally mapped are available by collaboration with libraries and can be used in exactly the same scope. The international collaboration between libraries (VIAF) provides a mapping between libraries from the US, CA, UK, FR, GER and many more. The international library author identification system made it possible to actually reach at the first matching a success of 60% of all scientists. The additional advantage is that librarians can finalize the Identity system in a kind of background process. The Kiel Data Management Infrastructure initiated a web service at Kiel for mapping from one ID to another. This web service supports the scientific workflows for automation of the data archiving process at world data archive PANGAEA. The long-lasting concept of the library identifier enables the use of these identifiers beyond the employment period, while it has nothing to do with the institutional IDM. The access rights and ownership of data can be assured for very long time since the national library with its national scope hosts the basic system. Making use of this existing system released resourced planed for this task and enabled the chance of interoperability on an international scale for a regional data management infrastructure.

Description: In times of whole city centres being available by a mouse click in 3D to virtually walk through, reality sometimes becomes neglected. The reality of scientific sample collections not being digitised to the essence of molecules, isotopes and electrons becomes unbelievable to the upgrowing generation of scientists. Just like any other geological institute the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research GEOMAR accumulated thousands of specimen. The samples, collected mainly during marine expeditions, date back as far as 1964. Today GEOMAR houses a central geological sample collection of at least 17 000 m of sediment core and more than 4 500 boxes with hard rock samples and refined sample specimen. This repository, having been dormant, missed the onset of the interconnected digital age. Physical samples without barcodes, QR codes or RFID tags need to be migrated and reconnected, urgently. In our use case, GEOMAR opted for the International Geo Sample Number IGSN as the persistent identifier. Consequentially, the software CurationDIS by smartcube GmbH as the central component of this project was selected. The software is designed to handle acquisition and administration of sample material and sample archiving in storage places. In addition, the software allows direct embedding of IGSN. We plan to adopt IGSN as a future asset, while for the initial inventory taking of our sample material, simple but unique QR codes act as “bridging identifiers” during the process. Currently we compile an overview of the broad variety of sample types and their associated data. QR-coding of the boxes of rock samples and sediment cores is near completion, delineating their location in the repository and linking a particular sample to any information available about the object. Planning is in progress to streamline the flow from receiving new samples to their curation to sharing samples and information publically. Additionally, interface planning for linkage to GEOMAR databases OceanRep (publications) and OSIS (expeditions) as well as for external data retrieval are in the pipeline. Looking ahead to implement IGSN, taking on board lessons learned from earlier generations, it will enable to comply with our institute’s open science policy. Also it will allow to register newly collected samples already during ship expeditions. They thus receive their "birth certificate" contemporarily in this ever faster revolving scientific world.

Description: The need for data capturing during the data creation process becomes increasingly important in regard to mandatory data submissions in addition to article submission

Description: The architecture of Kiel Data Management Infrastructure (KDMI) is setup to serve from the data creation process all the way to the data publication procedure. Accordingly the KDMI is managing data at the right beginning of the data life cycle and does not leave data unattended at this very crucial time. Starting from the chosen working procedure to handwritten protocols or lab notes the provenance of the resulting research data is captured within the KDMI. The provenance definition system is the fundamental (see figure 1) capturing tool for working procedures. The provenance definition is used to enable data input by file import, web client or hand writing recognition. The captured data in the provenance system for data is taking care of unpublished in house research data created directly on site. This system serves as a master for research data systems with more degrees of freedom in regard to technology, design or performance (e.g. GraphDB, etc). Such research systems can be regarded as compilations of unpublished data and public domain data e.g. from World Data Centers or archives. These compilations can be used to run statistical data mining and pattern finding algorithms on these specially designed platforms. The architecture of the KDMI ensures that a technical solution for data correction from the slave systems to the master system is possible and improves the quality of the stored data in the provenance system for data. After the research phase is over and the interpretation is finished the provenance system is used by a workflow based publication system called PubFlow. Within PubFlow it is possible to create repeatable workflows to publish data into various external long-term archives or World Data Center. The KDMI is based on the utilization of persistent identifiers for samples and person identities to support this automatized publication process. The publication process is the final step of the KDMI and the management responsibility of the long-term part of the data life cycle is handed over to the chosen archive. Nevertheless the provenance information remains at the KDMI and the definition maybe serves for future datasets again. Unattended data may get lost or be destroyed

Description: Data mining is not only a simple application of an algorithm on the data set. It is rather a systematic approach that is absolutely necessary, if we want to obtain useful and meaningful patterns from data. This paper shows how the usage of systematic data mining can help to simplify the first determination of the quality of marine habitats in the western Baltic Sea. The Benthic Quality Index (BQI) has been introduced within the European Union Water Framework Directive to assess the quality of marine habitats. The index is based on sensitivity/tolerance classification and quantitative information on the composition of soft-bottom macrofauna. The calculation of the index is based on the exact designation of the found taxa

Description: Reluctance to deposit data is rife among researchers, despite broad agreement on the principle of data sharing. More and better information will reach hitherto empty archives, if professional support is given during data creation, not in a project's final phase.