Integrated management of marine and coastal areas requires access to a wide range of data types that cannot access through a single institution.

• National NODC websites (www.nodc-countryname.org)
• ODINAFRICA website (www.odinafrica.org): is the projects window to the world, giving information on the project and access to its services and products such as databases (directories of institutions and experts, catalogues of library holdings, marine related documents about/from Africa, catalogues of datasets and details of their location and accessibility) and services (document delivery services,  .. ..)
• African Sea Level Network website (www.iode.org/glossafrica)
• African Ocean Portal (www.africanoceans.net) This has been the portal through which users are able to access all sort of marine related information relevant to Africa- including links to useful sites, directories and catalogues.
• Development of Ocean Data Portals: The IODE’s Ocean Data Portal (ODP) will provide seamless access to collections and inventories of marine data from the NODCs in the IODE network and will allow for the discovery, evaluation (through visualisation and metadata review) and access to data via web services. The system architecture will use Web-oriented information technologies to access non-homogeneous and geographically distributed marine data and information.  The Ocean Data Portal will deliver a standards-based infrastructure that provides the integration of marine data and information from a network of distributed IODE NODCs as well as the resources from other participating systems.

The ODP will also be a Data Collection or Production Centre (DCPC) providing data and services to the WMO Information System (WIS). This will link IODE National Oceanographic Data Centres with the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS). The ODP can be queried in various ways from an easy-to-use Google-like interface to a powerful geospatial query interface.

Within the framework of ODINAFRICA-IV the NODCs will be able to “plug-in” their databases into OceanDataPortal as data providers. NODCs with web-serving capability (and permanent internet connection of sufficient bandwidth) will be able to directly connect to ODP. NODCs without a permanent internet connection and/or web-server capability will be able to use the central node at the IOC Project Office for IODE and serve their data sets through that facility.

ODINAFRICA will collaborate with other initiatives which also have portal projects covering parts of Africa, such as the UNEP Nairobi Convention Clearing House Mechanism and SeaDataNet.