Best practices for enhancing data and services interoperability in Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO)

The "EU Public Infrastructure for the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO-Infra)" project main aim is to build the EU public infrastructure backbone for the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO). The EU DTO's purpose, as an enabler of the EU Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters, is to provide actionable knowledge for ocean communities, addressing challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss and will impact policy and decision-making in sectors like fisheries, aquaculture, and offshore renewables.
The initiative involves integrating key components of existing EU ocean marine assets, such as the "Copernicus Marine Service" and the "European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet)," into a unified digital framework. The EDITO service platform is designed with a sustainable, scalable digital architecture aligned with key initiatives and aims to support the development of the EU DTO, hosting applications from various digital twin projects and connecting with related projects.
Standards are of paramount importance for ensuring interoperability for data and services in the frame of DTO. In the past few years, the marine data from two major assets, Copernicus Marine and EMODnet have been referenced into a common Data Lake, demonstrating the importance of data and metadata standard for a successful integration. EDITO relies on the experience of Copernicus Marine and EMODnet and will work further in future for the harmonization of marine data coming from different sources, engaging in a co-construction process with several projects. A practical example of co-construction and co-definition of new standard in collaboration between EU DTO, Copernicus Marine, EMODnet and EU R&D projects will be discussed highlighting the different steps and the structure of the process.
The description of the best practises for dealing with existing and new standards will be discussed and presented during this session.