Extending Data Catalogues to FAIRly Describe and Cite Ocean Science Resources: The ODATIS Experience

Earth system science relies on the integration of heterogeneous observations, models and methods across atmosphere, ocean, land and biosphere. In ocean science in particular, the analysis of complex and multidisciplinary datasets strongly depends on scripts, software, virtual research environments (VREs) and scientific services developed within laboratories and research projects. Yet these digital resources often remain scattered, poorly documented and difficult to discover, limiting their reuse, citation and contribution to FAIR and interoperable ocean science.

Within the ODATIS Ocean hub of the French research infrastructure Data Terra, acting as an EOSC node, we developed a concrete and operational solution to address this gap by extending a long-standing national ocean data catalogue towards a FAIR catalogue of ocean-related scientific resources. ODATIS has historically relied on GeoNetwork, the Sextant platform and the ISO 19115 standard to catalogue ocean datasets. Building on this foundation, we adapted the ISO 19115 metadata model and the Sextant catalogue to describe a wider range of resources relevant to ocean science, including scripts, software, applications, VREs, scientific support services and training materials, while remaining fully interoperable with existing data catalogues.

This development was carried out within the Gaia Data project of Data Terra, in close collaboration across thematic poles, leading to the co-design of controlled vocabularies dedicated to development languages, resource sub-types and data life-cycle stages. These shared semantic artefacts enrich metadata with machine-actionable information, enable faceted discovery, and strengthen semantic interoperability within and beyond the ocean community.

The resulting ODATIS resource catalogue is now operational and used in several national initiatives, including the PEPR BRIDGES programme and Gaia Data activities such as the “support to oceanographic campaigns” task, which develops a portfolio of services for cruise principal investigators. The catalogue provides a national entry point to assign DOIs to scripts and software required for scientific publications, while offering a visible showcase for ocean-related tools, services and VREs developed by laboratories, support teams and projects.

Beyond discovery and citation, the catalogue is designed as a foundation for a knowledge graph linking ocean datasets, processing tools, computational environments, services and training resources. This supports interdisciplinary and end-to-end use cases, connecting data to the methods and VREs required for their analysis. Community engagement is ensured through a coordinated outreach to ODATIS laboratory correspondents across France, fostering co-design, adoption and the creation of resource records. Altogether, this success story demonstrates how metadata standards, semantic interoperability and VRE-oriented cataloguing can effectively support FAIR and collaborative ocean science.