FY 1984

FOCUS: An environmental data accessing system for Alaskan fishery oceanography investigations

Parker, K.S., and D.C. McConaghy

In 1983 IEEE Proceedings of the Third Working Symposium on Oceanography Data Systems, IEEE Computer Society, 188–193 (1983)

NOAA's Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Center (NWAFC) and Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) are jointly developing a data accessing system known as FOCUS (Fisheries Oceanography Cooperative Users System) for use in investigations on ocean-fishery variability and interactions in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. By transforming data subsets into "mini relational data bases," FOCUS establishes software compatibility among existing data sets and analysis packages, thus creating a distributed data base environment. This procedure is designed to overcome the existing technical barriers of large data volume, spatial coverage, inconsistent data coding/formats and data redundancy. The system offers the ability to associate, join and directly analyze two or more data types from various environmental and fisheries data sets and computer systems in order to output statistical summaries, time series plots, contour plots and other integrated data analyses. FOCUS will facilitate interdisciplinary research and should lead to improved Alaskan fishery resource management and forecasting capabilities.