Vision

Inspire environmental data interoperability through the use of recognized standards, including OGC, W3C, ISO, and OASIS.

(Discussion of this is ongoing on OOSTETHYS@LISTSERV.TAMU.EDU and googledocs -- see the thread "[OOSTETHYS] Vision, Mission, and Goals" for an invitation to edit and the discussion.)

Mission

• OOSTethys mission is to facilitate integration of environmental observed
  data, by:
  
  - providing guidance of open source tools and standards
  - promoting interoperability test beds
  - developing tools when needed
  
  
• Integrate data (current almost real time) from ALL platforms and sensors in the marine world
• Provide guidance for data providers of marine observation offerings ( seminars, guides, cookbooks..)
• (More discussion on the OOSTETHYS@LISTSERV.TAMU.EDU thread with subject [OOSTETHYS] OOSTethys mission)
  

Goals

• Help developed standardized environmental observing systems
• For each component in an observing system: Research, Check tools, Decide, Implement, Validate and Facilitate

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Excerpt from OOSTethys Community Document

Standards Enable Innovation – Which standards?

Organizations and Processes

The point of this section is that there are a variety of processes for setting standards, a variety of standards organizations and the standards themselves can be quite complex. Futhermore, the standards evolve with time. Keeping up with the complexity and change is time consuming, and can become an impediment to adoption of standards. All of this complexity points to the value of a community approach where a collection of experts with complementary perspectives work together, leveraging and respecting each others expertise and producing a shared tool set. This is the philosophy underlying OOSTethys.

Design Requirements – Let function drive technology

This section should answer the question: What is it we’re trying to achieve? Interoperability isn’t a goal, it’s a feature of a useful network of shared information. Our goal for the Environmental Web 2.0 is a networked “system of systems” that provides value to some (the data users), and is sufficiently compelling for data providers that they want to go to the effort to become part of the system. It helps when the data users are also data consumers. In any case, we need to build the network to a set of design requirements that provide a goal of usefulness. The high level requirements for OOSTethys:

1. Data in the network should be discoverable through common interfaces, regardless of the data provider,
2. Data should include documentation of provenance and processes (such as quality control), while respecting the authority of the original data provider without whom the data wouldn’t be in the network,
3. Data should be accessible through a standarized single documented interfaces, regardless of data provider,
4. Data should be accompanied by sufficient documentation (i.e., metadata) to be easily used in an application.