The vast scale of the oceans, the difficulty and expense of making measurements due to the hostility of the environment and the internationality of the marine environment has led to a culture of data sharing in the oceanographic data community.
Traditionally, oceanographic data exchange was based on manual transactions involving delivery of physical packages of data on magnetic tape, CD-ROM or more recently by electronic FTP transfer.
It is essential that this metadata conforms to agreed standards to prevent the computing paradigm of 'garbage in, garbage out' blighting automated data exchange.
Many of these standards are community based, such as the CF conventions[3] developed for global climate modelling.
Significant progress documenting these informal standards leading to exposure and encouragement of best practice has been made by the Marine Metadata Interoperability[4] project.