ABS publishes metadata best practices

The aim is to support the growing development and adoption of smart, autonomous and remote-control functions in the marine and offshore industries.

Metadata defines and describes other data and what it relates to, providing context to enable data to be processed and translated into usable information.

The application of metadata will be further advanced as the amount of data collected on board vessels increases, and it becomes important to comprehensively describe and uniquely identify the data to enable efficient discovery.

Three standards are key:

• BS ISO 19848 provides a standard for data from equipment and machinery

• BS ISO 19847 provides requirement for onboard data servers used to collect data from onboard systems, store it and send it off the vessel

• ISO/IEC TR 20943-5 provides a metadata mapping procedure to enable interoperability.

Metadata registries are databases for storing metadata schemas, data elements and vocabularies to promote their reuse and standardization over time. Standard ISO/IEC 11179 provides a framework for metadata registries.

“Metadata is one of those behind-the-scenes elements of the digital transformation that impacts all aspects of a vessel from design to operation to decommissioning. Supporting ship owners and operators to capitalize on this information is core to our mission. Because of its role in translating other data, making it more useable, metadata is an essential element of smart, autonomous, and remote-control functions that rely on data to support decisions by humans or systems,” said Patrick Ryan, ABS Senior Vice President, Global Engineering and Technology.

ABS has also developed the ABS Advisory on Data Quality for Marine and Offshore Application — Time Series Data and the ABS Advisory on Data Quality for Marine and Offshore Application — Transactional Data.

The new advisory is available here.