Ocean Watch Datasets

A key type of resource on Ocean Watch are datasets. Datasets provide access to data. Built on top of datasets are other resources such as charts, maps, and indicators.

About Datasets

All datasets on Ocean Watch are stored on Resource Watch. Some datasets are published in the Resource Watch data catalog and others are not. These two categories of datasets are outlined below.

Published Datasets

Some of the Ocean Watch datasets are "published" on Resource Watch and are part of Resource Watch's public data catalog. If a dataset is published on Resource Watch, it can be access through the explore page. These datasets can also be accessed from their data assets on the Ocean Watch pages. Click the "i" button on the upper right hand corner of any of the data resources and find a link to the underlying dataset(s) on Resource Watch (if it is published).

You can learn more about each dataset on its "Metadata page." Example: Food From the Sea (foo.061)

For information on how a published dataset was processed, refer to the resource-watch/data-preprocessing repository (or the resource-watch/nrt-script repository if the dataset is regularly updating). You will also find links to a Github processing folders in the "Visualization" section of a dataset's Metadata page.

Unpublished Datasets

Other datasets on Ocean Watch are "unpublished" are are not accessible on Resource Watch's public data catalog. They are still accessible through the API and the Resource Watch backoffice. Often these datasets are tabular datasets and are not effectively visualized on the explore map. These datasets lack a "Metadata" page. The metadata is instead stored in the ocean-watch-data repository in the dataset directory (ocean-watch-data/datasets) along with any scripts or workflows used to process the data. Information on specific datasets can also be accessed via Ocean Watch pages. Click the "i" button on the upper right hand corner of any of the data assets and find a link to the processing folder and metadata in Github.

Catalog of Datasets

The Ocean Watch Data Team can find a catalog of all datasets on Ocean Watch on Sharepoint Sustainable Ocean Initiative\Documents\Ocean Watch\Development\Data\Dataset Tracking

Generating a catalog of datasets on Ocean Watch

Run the get_datasets.py script to generate a list of all the datasets that are currently used on Ocean Watch.