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Part I. OverviewTHE VISIONIOOS is envisioned as a system of regional, national, and global elements that rapidly and systematicallyacquire and disseminate data and data products to serve the needs of government agencies,industries, scientists, educators, non-governmental organizations, and the public. The IOOS visionis one of cooperative integration. The member entities will continue in the independent pursuit oftheir missions, while participating in a well-ordered data and information infrastructure. If IOOSwere a living being, the Data Management and Communications Subsystem would be its bloodand circulatory system—the data used to produce the information products needed by IOOS areanalogous to the oxygen and nutrients transported in the blood to feed the many highly specializedorgans.The following set of guiding principles addresses the DMAC vision:Interoperability: DMAC will serve as a framework for interoperability among heterogeneouscooperating systems. 4 The cooperating systems will be free to evolve independently to address theneeds of their target users. Software and standards needed to participate in DMAC will be availabledirectly to partners, or provided through commercial and non-commercial sources. DMAC willalso be interoperable with systems outside of the marine community that manage atmospheric andterrestrial data.Open, easy access and discovery: DMAC will enable users from all over the globe toeasily locate, access, and use the diverse distributed forms of marine data and their associatedmetadata and documentation in a variety of computer applications (e.g., Geographic InformationSystems, GIS, and scientific analysis applications). Users will be unencumbered by traditional barrierssuch as data formats, volumes, and distributed locations. DMAC will integrate cooperatingsystems so that data discovery will be seamless, and multiple versions will be easily tracked. Therewill be a “free market” of ocean sciences information, including officially sanctioned IOOS datasets, as well as data and products from other sources.Reliable, sustained, efficient operations: DMAC will provide high reliability with 24/7delivery of real-time data streams from measurement subsystems to operational modeling centersand users with time-critical requirements. It will provide high reliability in the delivery of com-4By “interoperable” we mean that systems can function cooperatively through seamless exchange of data, the blending of data derivedby different methods/instruments, an ability for models to access all varieties of source data without detailed knowledge of itsorigins, or the ability of users to see derived information in a way that is not limited by knowledge of the data collection methods orprocessing.16