LOIS Data Centres

There are five Data Centres each managing and storing data for different components of the LOIS Programme:

Rivers Data Centre at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology for the RACS River Basins (RACS(R)) component,
British Geological Survey Data Centre for the Land Ocean Evolution Perspective Study (LOEPS) component;

British Oceanographic Data Centre for the North Sea Modeling Study (NORMS) / RACS Coastal - Marine (RACS(C)) / Shelf Edge Study (SES) components;
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at Monks Wood for RACS Coastal - Terrestrial (RACS(C)) component.

Aims and Objectives

Collectively the aims and objectives of the Data Centres were:

To acquire major datasets from within and without NERC and make them available to the LOIS community.
To establish standards for data definition and exchange formats.
To provide data management services for LOIS data including quality control and archiving
To ensure long term security for the LOIS data and their availability to future science projects.

Data Policy

LOIS had a 'Data Policy' and 'Exchange Code' which applied to both those datasets collected by LOIS researchers and those from external organisations. It was intended to allow the exchange of data throughout LOIS to be as free as possible while ensuring the originators retention of scientific credit and observation of copyright. The main elements of the code were:

Data should be submitted to the Data Centre as soon as possible
Users of the data must inform the originators of the data
Credit must be given to the originators of the data
Copyright must be observed where appropriate