Remarks
Description: The MARGINS Data Portal was established in fall 2003 in response to a program call for a dedicated data system to facilitate open and timely exchange of data in support of the interdisciplinary science goals of the program. The Data Portal has been built with the primary goal of providing full cataloging, open access, and long-term preservation of data collected during MARGINS/GeoPRISMS programs. The backbone of the system is an expedition metadata catalog, which provides information on field programs (who, what, when and where), inventories of sensor data and samples, relevant metadata and the links to associated data files which reside either within the Data Portal or at distributed repositories. The system is designed to leverage all relevant existing data resources and provides a framework for a broader distributed data system.