Data
Usage terms applicable to downloadable data
Usage terms
Usage of the data made available by the BenthOBS SNO must be compliant with the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence. The data are freely downloadable, modifiable and can be redistributed. Any redistribution must include an explicit mention of the origin of the data, and redistributed data must not change the licence terms.
Making proper use of the data
In order to make optimal use of the data, it is advisable to get in touch with the data producers. A contact address can be found on the pages of every station contributing the BenthOBS SNO dataset.
Access to downloadable data
Direct access to downloadable data is available through:
Folder organisation
By default, the access point leads to the mos recent versions of the downloadable files. These files are organized in folders, with one folder per station. Two additional folders can also be found: an folder with a dataset resulting of the aggregation of all individual station files, and a folder with a specific file format (ODV). Files of each station can be reached by clicking the station identifier (first column of the list of stations). Previous versions of the datasets are available by using the Parent Directory link leading to a page listing all downloadble releases. These are named according to the release year and an index representing the release number in that year. Ex.: 2022_01 is the first release of 2022.
File organisation and contents
Files with normalized names are located in the station folders. File names start with the name of the station and the name of the "dataset" (which may be identical), and are followed with a keyword relative to the data they contain, amongst :
- "granulometry": percentages of each granulometric fraction of the sediment
- "hydrology": seawater temperature and salinity data
- "macrofauna": benthic macrofauna abundance data
- "organic matter": percentages of organic matter contained in the sediment
Depending on the nature of the data sampled at each station, not all files may be present for every station.
Data format
Data are supplied in tabular format, and columns are separated by tab characters (TSV format). All file starts with a header line speciying the column's contents.
Files are encoded using the Unicode UTF-8 standard. On certain operating systems, it may be necessary to check or to explicitly set the UTF-8 encoding when importing files in a spreadsheet tool (LibreOffice Calc, Excel).
The ODV files special case
In order to facilitate interoperability of the BenthOBS SNO data, the overall dataset matching a release is downloadable as a single ODV file, in a dedicated odv folder located at the top level of the download area. This folder also contains one file per type of data.