The Data Centre
The National Oceanographic Data Centre, at OGS, manages the most comprehensive marine data archive in Italy.
Since 2002, the Director of the Oceanography Division of the OGS has been the Italian representative in the network of data centres within the framework of the Programme for the International Exchange of Oceanographic Data and Information (IODE), established in 1961 by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.
In 2004, the OGS created the infrastructure of the National Oceanographic Data Centre (NODC) within its Oceanography Division to meet the ever-growing challenges of data management. The NODC was settled in accordance with the guide for establishing an IODE National Oceanographic Data Centre (IOC Manuals and Guides No.5).
Since 2009 OGS has been leading the IODE working group of the Italian Oceanographic Commission (COI).
In 2024, NODC was officially recognised by UNESCO as an accredited IODE National Oceanographic Data Centre. IODE-accredited data centres are also accredited as part of the World Data System, an International Science Council-affiliated body that promotes accessible data and transparent and reproducible science. NODC is one of the eleven marine data centres accredited by IODE worldwide and the first and only one in Italy.
The NODC is part of the system of multidisciplinary research infrastructures mapped in the open access website Mapping of the European Research Infrastructure Landscape (MERIL) and in the Registry of Research Data Repository (Re3data).
In addition, the Data Centre is included in the European Directory of Marine Organizations (EDMO) of SeaDataNet, the Pan-European Infrastructure for Ocean & Marine Data Management.
View the NODC timeline.
With over 300,000 water column profiles, in both coastal and deep sea areas, the NODC database is a treasure box of multidisciplinary information, spreading from physics to chemistry, from biology and geology to meteorology. The archive comprises over 460 million measurements, which are mainly collected by Italian institutions within the Mediterranean Sea basin, but the database also includes data collected by other countries within neighbouring sea basins.
