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17-12-20 GRSF data policy

Meeting Notes
Topics: Discussing data policy regarding the Regional Database use case.

FAO (Yann Laurent, Vivi Katifori)

Notes

What is the objective of the RDB use case?
RFMOs are international organisations formed by countries with fishing interests in an area. Some of them manage all the fish stocks found in a specific area, while others focus on particular highly-migratory species, notably tuna, throughout vast geographical areas.
The RDB use case will collect and offer data from the Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission (WECAFC), which focuses on all living marine resources, and mainly lobster, tuna, cod, flying fish and smaller fish, with the data coming from ministries and national departments where technical capacities, human resources and financial resources are limited. WECAFC is also a tuna RFMO - focusing on tuna for the Pacific Ocean. The catches data are reported directly from the big fishing boats.
What will be the data offered?
Reported data are statistics provided in a specific structure, including:
Time of year, species, gear type, vessel type, fishing area, quantity, live weight equivalent, which in some cases needs to be re-calculated. For example lobster weight = tail weight x 3. As some fishing boats are landing live lobster, others the tail, others the whole lobster but frozen.
Harmonization is needed at the level of the regional organization, as the type of information and classifications needs to be defined at a regional level. The regional data manager has to define templates based on the regional classification and offer the templates with guiding recommendation for the reporting organizations. This template is then spread out for the countries to use for their reports, as defined in their contracts for the RFMO.
How will this data be reported?
The national institutions are small. To report there is no technically interoperable infrastructure and reporting has to be done manually. They have created an excel plug-in and the regional data manager can copy the data.
The template provides parts of the classification and validates the data. Excel spreadsheet format is used to this end.
Once this data are submitted in the excel file template with the plug-ins for validation, they are sent to the regional database.
What is the status of implementation for the RDB use case?
The templating system is almost ready. The RDB will be a BB VRE.
Under which legal conditions for sharing and derivative products of data do your data providers provide data?
The RFMO has members, the contracting parties. The RFMO issues recommendations which are legally binding. The members are obliged to do so. The copyright is with the countries. The data that are reported are already public.
Wecafc is not yet RFMO, it is RFMB. RFMOs legal contracts have text that make the data as public. The legal status of the wecafc will change to support the new established RFMO. Its recommendations will change once it becomes an RFMO. This legal status will not change before the end of the project but they will use the system on a voluntary basis.
There are two levels of data that can be managed by RFMO, data that are public like aggregated information of a catch, but also information for the fisheries, like the vessel lists that should be kept confidential. Countries are requested to share but RFMO cannot make the data public.
For blue fin tuna, because we run models with the data from the countries, the stock is over exploited. The scientists sign a confidentiality document.
There are different levels of confidentiality and all this is well defined.
Access to confidential data will be upon request by scientists belonging to a particular working group in the commission. Authorized to access in an ad hoc basis. Will be granted access rights this way.
Public for everybody and ad hoc access to experts that will use sensitive data.
How will the data be cited?
There are two cases: data accessed by country or aggregated.
By country: the source should mention that they should cite all the sources, Fishery department of Jamaica, etc.
In the case of aggregated data, the national level will disappear and the citation will be the WECAFS regional database
What is the future of RDB after the end of BB project?
It is to be used. But it depends on the SLA between i-marine and RDB: Who will be the service provider?
What metadata should be added to datasets; should these be persistent (organization names and citation) or be free. Can you provide examples of what of ownership metadata could look like. Is the Dublin Core sufficient?
Different level of metadata:
1.related to publication and sharing - Dublin core is interesting here. Author, publisher, etc it is enough

  1. Metadata related to the data themselves: 1. Geo-referenced or not - fishing area 2. Standard metadata attached to geo-referenced datasets: type of area, definition of this area 3. Statistical reference metadata for datasets: methodology that is used, accuracy and precision - some are automatically created some have to be inserted. Work has been done on the geo-referenced metadata. - a proposal for standard reference metadata for statistical datasets is being prepared. Is the SDMX approach sufficient for organization storage and dissemination?
    This is a standard to exchange statistical data and metadata - example year- species-quantity of catches - with this system you can send it and decode it automatically, say that this is the structure of my dataset - three columns. The species are … (list) - unit, range. What is the type of structure and then all the data. So yes, more than enough: I will define the templates as SDMX. basically we are creating these DSD that are used as an excel pluggin, we are using it behind the scenes. Users could subscribe to these dsd and asked to be notified to retrieve these data. All the communication between different stakeholders can be simplified. Data producer will register his datasets and consumer can subscribe and receive notifications. Complex system and we do not need all this complexity And collections in the CKAN? Yes it is sufficient

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