Information for Data Users
Various institutions and agencies in numerous countries hold different types of data which are required for research purposes in BALTEX. For example, part of the observational data are collected operationally by national hydro-meteorological services and agencies of at least 10 different countries in the Baltic Sea drainage basin. All these institutions with potentially important data for BALTEX will be named data suppliers in the following.
The BALTEX Science Steering Group (SSG) has appointed four BALTEX Data Centres for meteorology, hydrology, oceanography and for radar data with the main objective to concentrate specific types of data or information (metadata) at these Centers, and thus to facilitate the data exchange between the different data suppliers on the one side and individual scientists or research groups within BALTEX on the other side. In the following the latter will be referred to as data users. General guidelines for the data exchange policy within BALTEX were outlined in the BALTEX Initial Implementation Plan.
Most of the data and information which are transmitted by the data suppliers and stored at the BALTEX Data Centers are subject to property rights or other legalities and, hence, to certain access restrictions. These data will be shortly referred to as BALTEX Data here. Rules and procedures for the exchange of BALTEX Data between BALTEX Data Centers and data users are determined through formal agreements between data suppliers and the BALTEX Data Centers. These rules will have to be confirmed and accepted by data users, who wish to have access to BALTEX Data. The data users are requested to register at the BALTEX Secretariat through the BALTEX Data User Identification Form and to sign licence agreements with the respective data center.
An important restriction is that BALTEX data will be passed only to registered BALTEX Data Users. Identification of BALTEX Data Users will be done by members of the BALTEX Science Steering Group (SSG) only, as decided on the 4th meeting of the BALTEX SSG (June 1996, Sopot, Poland). A list of authorised BALTEX Data Users is being stored at the BALTEX Secretariat and at the BALTEX Data Centres. Registration as a BALTEX Data User is performed upon request of the user and is subject to the following procedure.
Identification of BALTEX Data Users must be on the department level and has to include the name of the Principle Investigator, his complete address, the participants at his BALTEX project who will work directly with the data, and a short description of the BALTEX project the data are needed for. To facilitate communication it is urgently recommended to follow the key-words on the BALTEX Data User Identification Form. The project description should be short, the entire completed form must not be longer than one page. The users request has to be communicated by at least one member of the BALTEX SSG, preferably from the same country as the potential data user. In the course of the project any change of the research group membership has to be notified to the BALTEX Secretariat. The BALTEX Data User Identification Form may directly be downloaded as Word file here.
The BALTEX Secretariat and the BALTEX Data Centres will also provide forms upon request.
Summary
A BALTEX data user may receive BALTEX data from a BALTEX data center providing
- the user completed identification form has been communicated by one BALTEX SSG member and has been registered at both the BALTEX Secretariat and at the BALTEX data center,
- the users data request has been detailed to the respective BALTEX Data Centre,
- a BALTEX Data License Agreement has been signed by both the data user and the BALTEX data center.
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