O2A INGEST
Store and access your data and files. Automate your data flow, whether from a buoy, a satellite or vessel.
INGEST comprises the two main components "Files" and "Streams". It provides access to archived files and allows you to store files for your intruments. Streams offers fast and near real-time access to prepared data streams.
To long-term preserve and publish your data products visit PANGAEA directly and start a data submission.
Data Formats
We encourage you to store and archive your data in standard, open formats rather than proprietary ones. Open formats are documented publicly, can be read with free software, and remain usable in the future.
The Earth and environmental science community has established many such formats - in part with further recommendations:
- plain-text formats such as CSV or tab-delimited files for tabular data, see the O2A Near Real-Time Format Specification and [1] for recommondations,
- NetCDF (ideally following the CF Conventions) for gridded and time series data - see [2] for recommendations,
- HDF5 for large multidimensional arrays,
- GeoTIFF and GeoPackage for geospatial raster and vector data - see the O2A Viewer Creator Manual,
- Zarr for cloud-optimized arrays
Proprietary formats, such as vendor-specific binary files or spreadsheet workbooks, often depend on particular software versions, may become unreadable when licenses or products change, and hinder you and others from reusing your data.
If your (instrument) software writes a proprietary format, please keep the raw file as a backup, but also convert your data to an open format, with clear metadata describing variables, units and methods, before ingesting and archiving it. This keeps your data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) for you, your collaborators and future researchers.
References
Koppe, R., Immoor, S., & Anselm, N. (2019). Format specification for Near Real-Time format. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15783112 ↩︎
Saß B.L., Fösig R., Barthlott S., Getzlaff K., Geyer B., Haßler S.K., Kerzenmacher T., Kottmeier D., Lemmen C., Loewe K., Lorenz C., Loup U., Meyer E.M.I., Möller L., Obersteiner F., Pörsch A., Rebmann C., Riße M., Schäfer A., Sommer P.S., Söding E. (2026). Helmholtz Metadata Guidelines for NetCDF (version v1.0.0). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19691977 URL: https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/helmholtz-metadata-guidelines/hmg-netcdf-guidelines/hmg-netcdf-en ↩︎