Preface

Publishing marine image data in a FAIR and open way requires data curation for both image data and image metadata. These quality control steps need to follow common standard operating procedures (SOPs) to facilitate joint data interpretation. This repository mainly collects SOPs for the QA/QC steps between acquisition and publication. It also contains some example SOPs on image acquisition for the interested user. It does not yet provide operational steps for the publication phase (e.g. physical file transfer to Pangaea). The SOPs vary in granularity and not all may be applicable to your usecase.

To make full use of the MarIQT software tools that implement some of the SOPs functionalities, you need to follow the guidelines on file formats, adhere to the folder structure and the provenance documentation (which is done for you automatically while using MarIQT).

Standard operating procedures (SOPs)

More hands-on material on creating and using iFDOs is available in two OceanBestPractices Bundles. One on iFDO Creation and one on Image curation and publication.

Expressing workflows visually

This section is your starting point for exploring the MareHub AG V/I SOP documents. This readme provides some background and context information on how visualizations of the SOPs are structured and how the data workflow is explained. It is like an SOP for SOPs.

Workflows in general

SOPs generally describe how processes create or modify entities which are managed in infrastructure.

A project’s data workflow

In terms of research data, this is expressed by a data creation process that produces a data set entity which is managed in a data repository.

Actors in a workflow

Processes are conducted by an actor - in this case researchers - and similarly infrastructure is operated by actors - in this case a research data management (RDM) team. Infrastructure is further characterized by whether it is publicly accessible and whether it is machine-accessible. Accessibility by humans is always expected.

Documentation entities

Processes and entities can be accompanied by one or many documentation entities. These can take various forms, depending on use cases, SOPs, software tools used, etc. These documentation entities may be seen by some as just another data entity (“one wo:mans data is another wo:mans metadata”), we like to keep it separate. The format of the documentation entities (file format, information content, etc.) is defined by one or several actors. In case the file format is machine-readable, the documentation entity will be marked as such. Like data entities, documentation entities cannot be the end of a workflow. They needs to be further processed or be placed into an infrastructure. This infrastructure might also be access-restricted.

Status information

Of course, all SOPs should represent the best-case scenario and of course all their components should be in place and work as described. But as the marine imaging community is still developing their best-practices, some of the elements of SOPs are still under development. In that case, this is color-coded in the workflow figures: either there is no solution for the entire concept (of a process, entity, infrastructure or documentation) or there is one but it is not commonly supported, operated, executed or maintained.

Cheatsheet of the graphical elements