Data Policy and Challenges for Marine Robotics
Data are a fundamental product of marine robotics. The growth of novel unconventional platforms gave rise to a new generation of data, for which there is no standardization and, hence, no coordination. The importance of codifying these data is twofold: robotic and observational. Sharing the platform performance data will aid novel technology in accelerating their commercialisation. Bringing new robotics platforms to the market is the crucial point of technological advancement, it is effectively the rite of passage that marks the difference between impactful robotics and base research. The global observational effort needs the unprecedented information gathered from state of the art robots. Therefore, the data protocols applied to these newborn environmental data have to match the quality of those applied to traditionally collected data. Ultimately, classifying robotic and environmental data feeds into the widely welcomed concept of fair and open science.
The lecture focuses on the meaning of self-describing data, i.e. minimum metadata required. It describes the difficulties that arise analysing non-standardised data and it highlights the best practices to be used to create a seamless data treatment approach, from acquisition to interpretation. Whilst in marine sciences data policies are relatively defined, in marine robotics this is an unexplored ground. The purpose of the lecture is to stimulate a discussion and to lay out a common path to define a set of metadata and shared vocabulary for the data gathered by novel robotic platforms.