About

Marine Scotland Data is a platform for publishing datasets with associated digital object identifiers (DOI's).
This allow users to reference data appropriately, and for researchers to gain recognition for publishing data.

Marine Scotland Open Data Network

To facilitate as much access and information as possible, Marine Scotland provides access to open data and information across three platform of which this Marine Scotland Data is one.
The Marine Scotland Open Data Network consists off:

• Marine Scotland Information: Contextual information about topics and links to maps and datasets

• Marine Scotland Maps: Spatial data layers presentation and access to view and download services

• Marine Scotland Data (this site!): Access to data downloads and machine readable data and API interaction.

How this site is organised

Generally, content is organised on 3 levels: Groups, Datasets, and resources.
A Group is a way or organising related content together. Typically a group will contain many datasets (in the beginning you may find a few empty groups while we are still populating the portal with initial data)
A Dataset is a description of data or information that have all been collected/processed under the same activity. Often this activity might be writing a report, or collection of samples or data in a particular location, survey or Project.
Resources are always linked to a dataset. There can be one or more resources associated with a single dataset. Resources can be documents, data files or even links to other websites.

Data Stories

A new feature has recently been added to the site, enabling the creation of data stories with interactive graphics. We are working on creating the first stories, but for now, the section is empty.

Searching for data

When you search for data or information, you are searching on the dataset level. From there you will be able to select a dataset and access associated resources. The search is performed both on title, tags, and descriptive text.

Using the information you find

You are free to download and use the data and information on this site. There will be licensing information associated with each dataset, please check and ensure you understand the license.
Every dataset on this portal has a Digital Object Identifier (doi), and a pre-formatted citation box that tells you how to reference the dataset. If others resolves the doi in in your reference, they will be taken to the same page. Please do not use the website URL's as reference, use the citation and doi information instead. We may archive content or move things, which means that the website URL may not remain the same at all times. However, whenever such an operation is performed, the doi information will be updated with the most current address to a dataset. It is therefore highly recommended to use the doi as the citation.

Accessing machine-readable data (for the technical user)
This site is built on Drupal and DKAN, and the documentation for the DKAN API will provide more information about how to retrieve data in RDF or JSON from individual datasets.
You can retrieve a dataset list in JSON by calling http://marinedata.scotland.gov.uk/data.json
This will give you the full list of all datasets (so may take some time to resolve), including the identifiers required to retrieve details on individual datasets.

We are now starting to publish exmaples of how to utilise the API to retrieve and manipulate data that has been published. We will gradually be building on this, but you can find examples on our github page: https://github.com/MarineScotlandScience/Open-Data-Examples