Bottom-up capacity building for observations and measurements providers in RITMARE

In the creation of a decentralized infrastructure for marine data in the context of RITMARE, an Italian Flagship Project funded by the Italian Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università a e della Ricerca, a fundamental component is capacity building by data providers. This challenge has been tackled by providing the Starter Kit, a comprehensive set of domain-oriented software components bundled as virtual appliance that exposes standard services for the management observation data. We report on the characteristics of this toolkit, developed by the National Research Council (CNR), particularly with regard to the Sensor Observation Service.