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Current Data Products

Search Type / Sort By Options

Currently, the default search type is "Instruments by Location". This is the option visible on Data Search Step 1, entitled "Sort By:". The default option, "Instruments by Location", allows user to navigate to a location and select an instrument/device category from which to request data products in Data Search Step 2. For these search requests, data from multiple instruments of the same category are combined together to form a continuous time series. For example, to form a long time series of CTD data in Saanich Inlet, an "Instruments by Location" would stitch together the data from approximately 23 different CTD device deployments. The "Variables by Location" search type option is similar, except that users navigate to a location and select a sensor category variable, such as temperature, and then temperature sensor data is stitched together into a time series from the most appropriate devices at that location; also known as a "primary sensor search" or "search by water property". For many users, this search type is advantageous, as it does not require the user to know which device categories host which sensors and which of those are the best to use. For instance, many devices have temperature sensors, often auxiliary to the devices' main function, while the CTD devices generally have the best temperature sensors. The "Instruments By Category" search type option enables users to navigate to a device category, such as Hydrophone, then to a specific device (e.g. Ocean Sonics icListen HF Hydrophone 1252 (23155)) and then to a single device deployment (e.g. Cambridge Bay (03-Sep-2013 to 16-Sep-2014)). Users of this option are generally internal users and scientists who know the exact device they are interested in.

Data Product Options

For all scalar data products and some complex data products, users will be presented with options to customize their data products. These options are described in the individual data product pages. A compilation of the options is presented in the data product options page.

Data Quality

Data quality information is supplied by way of data quality flags and comments in the data products, as well as annotations listed in the metadata reports. See the Quality Assurance Quality Control page for more information.

Metadata

Metadata reports available with nearly all different data products. These PDF reports are produced automatically when a data search is completed and are made available via a link adjacent to the data, see step 3 in data search help. The reports contain extensive information about the data, including instrument location, deployment, calibration, data quality and data gaps.

Mobile Data

See the mobile device page to see how data products handle data from mobile devices.

Data Availability

Data availability is indicated in step 2. of Data Search. The green data availability bar is based on archived data and may not show data for the last 24 hours (until it is archived). All data that goes through the shore-station drivers is archived in a raw format nightly: log files. Some devices provide data through FTP or HTTP file transfers; the data availability graph will be accurate in that case and data products will be available in near real-time (usually delayed by a few minutes). Although the data availability bar doesn't show it, scalar data is available live: data is usually only a few seconds delayed as it comes up the wire and through the various parsing, conversion, calibrated and QAQC steps. Many complex data products (data that is multidimensional, such as acoustic backscatter or profile data) produce data from log files. These complex data products can, since October 2015, access the raw data prior to archiving, to produce near-live data, usually delayed by a few minutes. In all, users should be able to access near real-time data for all active devices, in addition to accessing historic data from as far back as 2002 (currently, we continue to acquire historic data).

Attribution

The data products shall contain attribution information wherever feasible, so that all contributed parties maybe credited and acknowledgements given. Roles and dates will be included. The MAT file products all contain a metadata structure with citation information. While the text file products (CSV, ODV) have attribution line(s) in their headers and plots will show a shortened version of the same text (no dates) below the plot. If a special attribution is blank, the company default shall be used, if that is blank, the company name and role are used. Attribution text appearing all products may be hidden with the "is attribution required" field on the Network Console (for internal use only). All plots are capable of supporting a special logo, see the spectrogram data product as an example. The logo is taken from the highest priority citation with the "is logo required" field set to yes. Metadata reports will provide information on how to cite ONC data, alternatively, see http://www.oceannetworks.ca/data-tools/data-help/data-policy/how-cite-us.

Conventions

Time-stamps: Time-stamps are always in UTC. For file-names and string dates, the format conforms to the ISO8601 convention: yyyymmddTHHMMSS. In some cases, the millisecond portion may be added: yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ. Numerical time-stamps within data product files may follow a different format as noted on the data product pages. For instances, numeric time-stamps within MAT files are in the MATLAB serial date format. When resampling, the time-stamps are generally taken from the the centre of the resample interval.

File-names: Note that the underscore character, "_", is used to separate the components of the names, while spaces, dots and other special characters are not included in file-names. File breaks are avoided as much as possible, but do occur for many reasons, including configuration or device changes, plus some data products have daily file breaks.

For an "Instrument by Category" search (see the "Sort By:" option in Step 1), files will be named as follows: DEVICECODE_SENSORNAME_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ-MODE.EXT where:

• DEVICECODE is a descriptive string unique to each instrument.
• SENSORNAME is the sensor name as it appears in data search, and is only included if a single-sensor data product was requested.
• The first yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ is the time-stamp (ISO8601 format) of the first record in the file; the second yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ is the last time-stamp in the file (including data flagged and replaced with NaN). The date-to time stamp is not mandatory for all files; in particular, files streamed directly from the file archive will not get a data-to in their file-names. The time-stamp format optionally includes milliseconds: yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ, where 'FFF' are the milliseconds. If there is a data gap at the beginning and/or end of the search time range, the file-name dates will be different fropm the search time range. In the case of plotted products, the search time range sets the range of time axis so that users effectively control the horizontal scaling. Consequently, the file-name dates for plots will match the search time range, not the data time range.
• MODE is optional text which allows files of the same extension to be differentiated. It is used for different operation modes (Kongsberg scan or sweep for instance) or different data product options or multiple formats of the same extension. For example, scalar MAT files will get an 'ANCILLARY' when on ADCPs so they are not confused with RDI MAT files. Data product option mode strings are used on scalar data products primarily, examples: '-NaN', '-clean', '-NaN_clean_avg15minute', '-MinMax1hour', see here for more details. Other data products supply file modes as described in their documentation.
• EXT is the file extension.

For an "Instrument by Location" search (see the "Sort By:" option in Step 1), files will be named as follows: STATIONNAME_DEVICECATEGORY_SENSORNAME_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ-MODE.EXT, where:

• STATIONNAME is the station name, including node and station names separated by dashes, for example: BarkleyCanyon-VPSUpperSlope.
• DEVICECATEGORY is the device category, such as "CTD". If there is more than one device in the category, the file will contain multiple devices combined together for a long record of data.
• SENSORNAME is the sensor name and is omitted for a device-level data product that contains multiple sensors.
• yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ, MODE and EXT are as above.

For a "Variables by Location" search (see the "Sort By:" option in Step 1), files will be named as follows: STATIONNAME_variables_SENSORCATEGORY_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ_yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ-MODE.EXT, where:

• STATIONNAME is the station name, including node and station names separated by dashes, for example: BarkleyCanyon-VPSUpperSlope.
• SENSORCATEGORY is the sensor category, such as "Temperature" or "Conductivity". If there is more than one device in the category, the file will contain multiple devices combined together for a long record of data.
• yyyymmddTHHMMSS.FFFZ, MODE and EXT are as above.

Interoperability Partners

These data products are linked to from Data Search Step 1.

File formats

Additional resources for available file formats is available here.