Rapid deployment of a RESTful service for data collected by oceanographic research cruises

Abstract

The Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) program has the mission to capture, catalog, and describe the underway environmental sensor data from US oceanographic research vessels and submit the data to public long-term archives. Information about vessels, sensors, cruises, datasets, people, organizations, funding awards, logs, reports, etc. is published online as Linked Open Data, accessible through a SPARQL endpoint. In response to user feedback, we are developing a RESTful service based on the Elda open-source Java package to facilitate data access. Our experience shows that constructing a simple portal with limited schema elements in this way can significantly reduce development time and maintenance complexity compared to PHP or Servlet based approaches.