» Malta Blue Pages

The Malta Blue Pages is an internet-based directory system for ocean & marine data and information, targeting to establish a single-point online reference, access and repository for a number of marine data sources and descriptions in the field of marine environmental and oceanographic data in Malta.

The main aim of the Malta Blue Pages is to address the questions:

•  What data do we have?
•  When and where was it collected?
•  Who holds that data?
•  Can the data be acquired?

Serving as a marine data bank and promoting data management practices according to established international standards, the Malta Blue Pages contains different sources of ocean and coastal marine datasets, data catalogues and data inventories, providing a comprehensive information website on local marine professionals and local marine-related projects, rendering such initiatives more visible as well as making results and derived marine data more accessible and presentable in useful form for a wide range of end-users.

Keys to the success of marine-related research initiatives and to an effective support of marine assessments, policy formulation and environmental management are the speed and the ease with which oceanographic and marine data & information can be identified, located, accessed, exchanged and used.

For a more effective and integrated use, such data & information needs to have a consistent data quality level, and transcoded into common or compatible formats. The main scope of the Malta Blue Pages is precisely to bring local datasets together in a coherent manner to allow their integrated access, management, retrieval and dissemination.

The Malta Blue Pages is a project of the Physical Oceanography Unit of the IOI-Malta Operational Centre at the University of Malta , the local entity responsible for supporting oceanographic data management practices and the local focal point for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) / International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE).