Fostering bottom-up capacity in managing and sharing marine observations: the RITMARE StarterKit

Capacity building by data providers is a fundamental task in the creation of a decentralized infrastructure for marine data in the context of RITMARE, the Italian Flagship Project for marine research. This challenge has been tackled by providing the Starter Kit, a comprehensive set of domain-oriented software components that exposes standard web services for the management of maps and observations from sensors. We report on the characteristics of this toolkit, developed by the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy, particularly with regard to the underlying service-oriented approach and the facilities offered to research data providers.