Feasibility study on the development of KOSMESEA
CIL-OLP is coordinating a feasibility study for the development of a Regional Knowledge Organisation System for Marine Environmental Data in Southeast Asia (KOSMESEA). The project started in October 2019 and is due for completion on 30 June 2021.
The ambition of this project is to investigate the feasibility of a KOSMESEA through enhancing accessibility of regional marine environmental data with a view to inform implementation of ocean law and policy. The approach taken is that such development would also improve the protection of the marine environment and management of marine and coastal resources.
The idea of a KOSMESEA is based on the observation that records of marine environmental data relating to Southeast Asia are scattered around the world in a number of private and institutional hands, in different formats including digital and hard copy documents, as well as in global and regional databases developed for different purposes, for different taxa and/or for different geographical areas. These databases also have different digital architectures and metadata.
KOSMESEA involves several parallel workstreams:
- Inventory of relevant online data sources for the region and their metadata (including databases, reports and peer-reviewed publications),
- Exploration of potential partnership with regional data repositories, and
- Pilot study and data aggregation for three species that occur in the seas of Southeast Asia: a finger coral (Acropora humilis), the big eye tuna (Thunnus obesus) and the bottlenose wedgefish (Rhynchobatus australiae).
KOSMESEA core project team brings together expertise in marine sciences, ocean law and policy and computer sciences. Since October 2019, It has been composed of three co-leads Youna Lyons, Danwei Huang and Zeehan Jaafar and three members (Choo Heng Kek, Lim Cheng Ling and Clarence Sim) as well as additional support provided by NUS colleagues and students. The team has also partnered with NUS Library which provides additional expertise and support on metadata, data organisation systems and data hosting.
