NC Data Service

NERC's environmental data is used by a very wide range of users, spanning academic, research, business and government and voluntary sectors. Where possible, the data is made freely available without charge apart from special cases that involve third party data. Users of NERC data are spread across a very wide range of countries. All of this data is made available by NERC's five environmental data centres, the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC), the National Geoscience Data Centre (NDGC) and the Polar Data Centre (PDC). This proposal for the management and delivery of NERC's data centres is therefore at the root of a large fraction of the impact of NERC-funded research. NERC also recognises that there are additional potential users of its environmental data who for a variety of reasons have not yet been able to make use of the assets. NERC has therefore launched an initiative, Dodona, to reach out to these new users. This initiative will be supported by the data centres both through direct provision of data but also through an Integration Programme to develop services to supply diverse data sets in a seamless manner not requiring the users to have prior knowledge of the individual data sources.