1. Panel Discussion The Colour of Ocean Data - The Palais des Congrès, Brussels, Belgium, 25-27 November 2002 C. Maillard IFREMER/SISMER NODC of France

2. DC1: Role of the data Centres in managing data from the global science programs to offer a perennial and high technology level infrastructure and professional staff to contribute to the project data management structure to disseminate the existing international standards and expertises as a minimum basic requirement for data management, especially for the meta-data and the quality control assesments to provide standardized complementary data sets to the projects

3. DC2: Challenges that the data centres need to face individually and collectively to be professional and operational to insure that all the data are –safely archived –checked for quality –timely processed and delivered –diseminated by internet and other adapted communication systems to return products to the data providers and the other users –integrated observations data sets from various sources –value added synthetic products –contributions to scientific papers to convince the data collectors and the supporting agencies that is is valuable to spend a low percentage of the overall cost of the data collection for the archiving

4. DC3: What added value comes from managing data in data centres? providing a perennial archiving system able to cope with the changes in the media technology insuring that the data documentation is in accordance to the international standards and the data organization not “person dependant” avoiding the dispersion of the data in hundreds of laboratories or scientific teams with different data management methodologies assembling long time series of data of the same type providing timely access to data through dedicated to data servicing teams optimizing the costs and manpower

5. to insure one WWW link to all : that is possible, at least with limited speed to insure the participation of both +D/-D Countries in the developement of common databases –the data policy should insure a wide data circulation –the developing countries should also contribute to the international effort –the job training on practical issues should enhance the mutual sharing of expertise ALL1: What to do to reduce the impacts of technological differencies betwen devloping and developed countries? to insure also the dissemination of large data sets by other adapted media than WWW

6. ALL 2: Differences between data management practices between biological and physical oceanographers? More complicated data sets in biology: a 5th dimension with the taxonomy necessity of linking environmental parameters, bio- chemistry and biological observations in different compartments water column, SPM, sediment, biota.. Less practises of data exchange and computer technology among the biologists, including the documentation of the coordinates The bio observations are frequently too dependent on the measurement technology to be intercomparable

7. ALL3: three wishes a common work on the standards for various parameters, not only for temperature and salinity a better acknowledgement of the data submission from the experimentators: the submission of a data set that pass the QC at a data centre should be recognized as a « rank A » publication a better public awareness of the data legacy and the « data librarian duty »: how to follow the climate change without long time series of good data?