Project Description

The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) was created to serve PIs funded by the NSF Geosciences Directorate (GEO) Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE) Biological and Chemical Oceanography Programs and Office of Polar Programs (OPP) Antarctic Sciences (ANT) Organisms & Ecosystems Program.  BCO-DMO manages and serves oceanographic biogeochemical, ecological, and companion physical data and information developed in the course of scientific research and contributed by the originating investigators.  The BCO-DMO data system facilitates data stewardship, dissemination, and storage on short and intermediate time-frames.  Our main objective is to support the scientific community through improved access to ocean science data.

The BCO-DMO manages existing and new data sets from individual scientific investigators and collaborative groups of investigators, and makes these available via any standard web browser. The JGOFS/GLOBEC distributed, object-oriented, relational data management system software is used to serve data and information to research investigators as well as the larger community.

The office works with principal investigators on data quality control; maintains an inventory of available data and program thesaurus based on a controlled vocabulary; generates metadata records required by Federal agencies; ensures submission of data to national data centers; supports and encourages data synthesis by providing new, online, web-based display tools; facilitates interoperability between BCO-DMO and distributed data portals; and facilitates regional, national, and international data and information exchange. A full description of BCO-DMO is available as a downloadable PDF file (1.2 MB) (download PDF).

Oceanographic Data Repositories

The BCO-DMO provides continuing curatorship for the US GLOBEC and US JGOFS data repositories as well as several others. View a list of links to data systems »

Contributing Data or Other Project Results

If you would like more information about the BCO-DMO or information about contributing data to the BCO-DMO collection, please see our Resources page or contact someone in our office.