ocean observing systems

Integrating fragmented bathymetric data through shared standards and FAIR practices

Vertical-datum heterogeneity remains the barrier least tractable to specification alone. A new review maps hydrographic standards onto the fifteen FAIR sub-principles, revealing that bathymetric data already meet demanding reusability conditions through mandatory depth-and-uncertainty encoding. Yet findability is largely unaddressed: identifiers from IHO S-100 are unique within an exchange set but not globally resolvable. Interoperability works at the encoding level but not semantically. The binding constraint is not missing standards, it is the absence of machine-resolvable linkage between them.