A - C
BIOMASS
The BIOMASS Programme was established in the late 1970's for the study of the Antarctic marine ecosystem and its living resources. Data were collected during 3 major field experiments between 1981 and 1985. The first focused on extended spatial coverage, whilst the second and third were concerned with repeat sampling at pre-defined locations to give a temporal sequence. Data collected from these field experiments were transferred to a central BIOMASS Data Centre to enable their standardisation for integrated analysis. The Data Centre was also responsible for running a series of data analysis workshops. With the end of the BIOMASS Programme in 1991, the data set and its supporting documentation are being prepared for distribution to those scientists who took part in BIOMASS and to any other investigators who request copies. The BIOMASS Data Centre faced many problems in standardising, integrating and documenting the data supplied by individual researchers into a coherent data! set. The majority of these problems were managerial rather than technical. There was a lack of integration of the data management with the objectives of the science programme. For example, the need for a BIOMASS Data Centre was identified in 1979, but it was not finally established until 1986. Once established, the Data Centre did not always respond to the scientific requirements of the programme. There was an over reliance on software that was developed within the Data Centre instead of using commercially available products. Time was spent creating and testing software, which would have been better spent supporting data analysis. Problems were experienced in persuading individual researchers to contribute data to the Data Centre. Researchers often found that the effort involved in submitting their data to the Data Centre was much greater than the benefits they gained. Ensuring that the data were validated and of the required quality was also difficult. The task was hampered by the lack of supporting information about the data themselves (the meta-data). Restricted access to certain data sets reduced the effectiveness of the BIOMASS Data Centre and it operated for much of its life with a very restrictive data access protocol. This was designed to protect some data sets before their originators had published their own analyses, but hampered the distribution of data to the wider BIOMASS community. The lessons that have been learned from BIOMASS about the management of complex, large-scale, biological data sets will be of great use to future programmes. Increasing the quality of data holdings, especially by the inclusion of meta-data, will increase the chances of successfully networking databases together to support biodiversity and other research.