The Ocean InfoHub (OIH) Project aims to improve access to global oceans information, data and knowledge products for management and sustainable development. The OIH will link and anchor a network of regional and thematic nodes that will improve online access to, and synthesis of existing global, regional and national data, information and knowledge resources, including existing clearinghouse mechanisms. The project will not be establishing a new database, but will be supporting discovery and interoperability of existing information systems. The OIH Project is a three-year project funded by the Government of Flanders, Kingdom of Belgium, and implemented by the IODE Project Office of the IOC/UNESCO.

The Ocean InfoHub Project and ICAN, both being projects of the IOC/UNESCO IODE Project Office, have had a number of discussions over the past months to align their efforts for mutual benefit.

OIH attended one of the recent ICAN tech meetings, to present a general overview of the project as well as a presentation of the OIH technical approach, incorporating schema.org.

  • ICAN joined the first OIH Steering Group meeting
  • OIH has been joining regular ICAN SG meetings
  • ICAN has joined the OIH Technical Working group platforms.
  • Other ICAN members are invited to join, particularly on the spatial data and maps sub-theme.

OIH and the ICAN tech group are in ongoing communication about some potentially mutually beneficial activities for 2021.

OceanInfoHub

The OIH intends to meet the knowledge needs of national and regional requirements for sourcing marine data and information, as well as to assist countries in their reporting requirements for the Sustainable Development Goals 4 (Quality Education), 9 (Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure), 14 (Life Below Water) and 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).

For more information about the Ocean InfoHub Project please contact Lucy Scott: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.


About Schema.org

Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet. In addition to people from the founding companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex), there is substantial participation by the larger Web community, through public mailing lists such as This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and through GitHub.

Since April 2015, the W3C Schema.org Community Group is the main forum for schema collaboration, and provides the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. mailing list for discussions. Schema.org issues are tracked on GitHub.

The day to day operations of Schema.org, including decisions regarding the schema, are handled by a steering group, which includes representatives of the founding companies, a representative of the W3C and a small number of individuals who have contributed substantially to Schema.org. Discussions of the steering group are public.

Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!
You use the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats to add information to your Web content.

Some commonly used  item types from Schema.org:

  • Event
  • Organization
  • Person
  • Place
  • Thing

A full list of all items types can be viewed at this link.

Schema.org Example

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">

     <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>

     <a href="/../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a>

</div>

Vol, 8, Nr 2 - Now Available!

We are now entering our 9th year publishing the ICAN newsletter. Many thanks to our Editor Andy Sherin!

Please consider preparing an article for the next newsletter that will likely be published in the spring of this year.

Happy New Year!

Photos from CoastGIS 2018

Our friends from CoastGIS 2018 have posted a wonderful gallery of photos, including the recent ICAN mini-workshop:

See how many ICAN members you can spot!