Guidelines and Policy

ICES Data Type Guidelines

Data held at the ICES Data Centre are used in various assessments for expert groups and regional sea conventions. In order to ensure comparable data with high quality, guidelines have been developed and adopted.

The ICES operational group, Data and Information (DIG) have developed guidelines to assist those involved in the collection, processing, quality control and exchange of various types of (mainly) physical oceanographic data, for example, Moored Current Meter, Shipborne ADCP, Seasoar, Chlorophyll and Nutrient data. These guidelines have been adopted by the ICES Data Centre and are recommended to the ICES Community.

Each guideline addresses the data and metadata requirements of a specific data type. They cover three main areas:

What the data collector should provide to the data centre (e.g. collection information, processing, etc)
How the data centre handles data supplied (e.g. value added, quality control, etc)
What the data centre can provide in terms of data, referral services and expertise back to the data collector