It’s widely known that most of the Earth is covered in water; the ocean alone covers 71% of the planet’s surface to be exact. The ocean contains fathoms of data, and with over 90% of it still to be explored, its processing and analysis is the very model of a Big Data problem. Marinexplore is a new open data collaboration platform and community containing 463,447,500 oceanographic measurements collected from 23,422 sensors.
In an interview with Wired, founder Rainer Sternfeld states that researchers devote 80% of their time to processing data, most of which has not been available in a central portal. With Marinexplore, Sternfeld aims to change that by aggregating the estimated 3 petabytes of publicly-available ocean data and providing a platform for researchers, marine technology engineers, and citizen scientists to collaborate, share insight, and explore the ocean’s depths through interactive 3D visualizations of the data.
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