Terms of Service

The ODN Portal is a web application operated by Ocean Data Network (“ODN”, “we”). It gives authorised users access to oceanographic and fisheries data collected by ODN partner vessels and programmes. The portal is provided on an as-is basis.

Accounts are created by self-registration but require administrator approval before sign-in is enabled. We may refuse, suspend, or close any account at our discretion, in particular if it is used to abuse the portal or to access data the user has not been authorised to see.

You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for activity that occurs under your account. Notify us promptly at data@oceandata.net if you suspect unauthorised use of your account.

Vessel access is granted per user by an administrator. The vessels visible to you and the data attached to them (temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, weather station, motion graph, and the per-tow metadata that ships with each) are made available for your scientific, operational, and fisheries-management use as a member of ODN’s data-sharing partnership.

You may download the raw per-sample data for any vessel you have been granted access to, in CSV, Excel, or Parquet form. Where an administrator has configured anonymisation rules for your account, the affected vessels export under those rules.

You agree NOT to:

• attempt to access vessels, datasets, or administrative tools you have not been granted access to;
• re-distribute data covered by a confidentiality flag outside the partnership without explicit permission;
• attempt to identify a vessel that has been anonymised for another user, including by reverse-engineering the per-user tokens in URLs;
• probe, scan, or load-test the portal’s infrastructure; bypass rate limits; or attempt to break the authentication or authorisation system;
• use the portal to violate any applicable law or to harass other partners.

How we handle personal data is described in our Privacy Policy, which is part of these terms.

We aim to keep the portal available continuously, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. We may add, change, or remove features; the data pipeline behind the portal is operated by partner vessels and programmes whose schedules are outside our control.

Material changes to these Terms or to the Privacy Policy are flagged in the portal so you can review them before continuing. The current version always sits at this URL.

The ODN Portal is provided AS IS. The vessel and environmental data shown is the best we have at any given time but is not warranted to be complete, current, or free of errors. ODN, its partners, and contributors are not liable for decisions made on the basis of the data, nor for any loss arising out of the use of, or inability to use, the portal.

You can close your account at any time from the Danger Zone on your profile. We may close or suspend accounts that breach these Terms, with or without notice depending on the severity. Closing your account deletes the data described in the Privacy Policy; administrative audit-log entries that reference your account survive the deletion for traceability.

Questions about these Terms or about your use of the portal: email data@oceandata.net.