Database Reference
In-Depth Information
doing the right thing before we built the product. We started by aggregating
public data sets and building a community around the product. Today we have
about 7,400 members in our community, and to date we have aggregated data
for 33 organizations, including NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration] and NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration]. In
building the community and collecting data for organizations, we learned how
professionals—oceanographers, ocean experts, GIS [Geographic Information
System] experts, analysts, and so on—need the data to be served to them, how
they want to connect their models, how they want to connect their devices, in
which way it's best to integrate with them, and how best to visualize the data.
By working on public data sets, we were able to quickly iterate our platform,
add APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], add visualizations, and compose
different data distribution functions. This work was very much the focus in the
first year.
With that knowledge, we then identified different markets, like oil, gas, shipping,
insurance, federal governments, defense, and security that we knew would be
interested in our data. From there, we started to focus on commercializing
what we had learned and built. So the second year was about building a com-
mercially viable product, which is now available. This has very much meant
that we've had to pay extra attention to the aspects of data privacy and trust.
We've spent a considerable effort on metadata handling—making sure that
the data streams we provide to analysts, or data scientists, and data engineers
have sufficient metadata for building trust in the data.
To provide this trust and data privacy, we've looked into different sensors and
standards for handling sensor data. We also hired a US cyberinfrastructure
expert, who had been focused on ocean infrastructure in the US. With him
and other professionals, we built a model that now supports both private and
public data streams. We finalized it in a product that allows you to manage,
analyze, and distribute ocean data.
Naturally we also had to do a lot of work to add the most important data
types: time-series forms of data for models, satellites, high-frequency radars, as
well as data from National Data Buoy Center profilers and ADCP [Acoustic
Doppler Current Profiler], which is essentially sonar data measuring ocean
currents. Adding those data types allowed us to create a platform that's mean-
ingful and useful for ocean professionals. It used to be that everyone inte-
grated this data manually on their own in isolation. Now they have a system
that actually does it for them. The intent is to continue to grow the product
in a way where hardware vendors and oceanographers can contribute to the
platform, as well as add more data themselves.
Gutierrez:
Why is the company exciting to you and your team?
