1. FOLDER STRUCTURE FOR DATA FILES
OTGA – UEM TRAINING COURSE – FUNDAMENTALS OF OCEACOGRAPHIC DATA MANAGEMENT , JANUARY 2017, MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE
Prepared by: Harrison Ong’anda,
National Coordinator,
Kenya National Oceanographic Data Center (KeNODC)

2. Need for standard folder
Data managers deal with many types of files. To these files (and they will be many as continue working), some sort of ‘standard’ folder structure is necessary.
This may consist of top levels only (2 or 3 levels within the main folder)
Generally the files can be summarized into three categories:
Data
Products
Metadata

3. Examples PROJECT MOZAMBIQUE – Project files for this area DATA
BASEMAP
BORDERS – international, national, regional, local
GEOLOGY – sediment thickness
RELIEF – bathymetry and topography
OCEAN
WOD – World Ocean Database
WOA – World Ocean Atlas
OTHER SOURCES – separate folders identified by acronyms are optional here
METADATA – Detailed information about any of these datasets – there is always a format

4. PRODUCTS – files created by the following main programs
HDFVIEW – text exports, created by this program, from large grids in HDF or NetCDF
IDV – Maps and syntheses made by Integrated Data Viewer
ODV – Collections and their products made with Ocean Data View
COLLECTIONS - Individual collections of data by data type, area or other original selection criteria
IMAGES – Saved images of graphics
INTERPOLATIONS – XYZ data triplets exported from ODV’s “surface mode” analyses
SAGA – Grids and vector products made by the public domain program
GEOIMAGES – Geo-referenced images – includes GeoTIFF etc
GRIDS – grids in Saga format, including template grids
PROJECTS – lists of objects to place in one map, including the display properties of the objects
VECTORS – points, lines, contours, polygons, wind arrows, current arrows; all as either ESRI shapes or Google KML/KMZ

5. EXERCISE/HANDS-ON FOR FOLDER STRUCTURE