The dataset or species page on the OBIS-SEAMAP web site can be accessed via a direct link to these pages.
All you need to know is the dataset id or species ITIS taxonomic serial number. Dataset IDs or species TSNs are found at various ways/places including non-interactive Species List or Datasets List.

• Direct link to a Dataset Page: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/dataset_id
  where dataset_id is the dataset ID.
• Direct link to a Species Profile Page: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/species/tsn
  where tsn is the ITIS taxonomic serial number of the species.

While the above links take you to the interactive web page for more exploration, there are static versions of the page.

• Link to a static Species Profile Page: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/species/tsn/html
  
• Link to a static Dataset Page (in HTML format): http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/dataset_id/html
• Link to a FGDC-compliant metadata page (in XML format): http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/dataset_id/xml
• Link to a FGDC-compliant metadata page (with a nice style): http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/dataset_id/xml/xsl
• Link to a GCMD DIF metadata page: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/dataset_id/dif

OBIS-SEAMAP supports OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) web services such as WMS, WFS and KML.

Although OGC is the international standards, there are inevitably a lot of so-called vendor-specific rules on actual uses.
Most typical usage of the OBIS-SEAMAP OGC services is to request a OGC service for your species or dataset of interest.
It's a good idea to start with obtaining the capability document. The following URLs return the very basic OGC capabilities of OBIS-SEAMAP.

• WMS capability document
• WFS capability document

Looking through the capability document, you will probably wonder how to get a WMS image of a specific dataset or species.
This is where the vendor-specific parameters come to play a role.
First thing you would like to try is to add 'wms' or 'wfs' to the direct link for a species or dataset mentioned above.
For example, for Kogia breviceps (pygmy sperm whale),

• WMS image of Kogia breviceps: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/species/180491/wms
• WFS document of Kogia breviceps: http://seamap.env.duke.edu/species/180491/wfs

Still you will have a lot of questions to make best use of the OBIS-SEAMAP OGC services. For example, how to zoom in to the extent of the dataset on a WMS image; how to add continents to a WMS image; how to limit WFS results within your study area etc.
'OBIS-SEAMAP OGC services (coming soon)' page gives you the full details.

Note that as the OBIS-SEAMAP data tend to be huge even for a particular species/dataset, you'll experience performance issues on OGC services
Therefore, it's recommended that you utilize the OGC services through the online pages rather than directly entering the service URL into your browser. The online pages are designed to deal with time-out issues inherit to browsers.

As a thematic node of the International OBIS Network, OBIS-SEAMAP is able to exchange data via DiGIR (Distributed Generic Information Retrieval).

• Main DiGIR URL (This is the default DiGIR provider link that returns resources metadata)
• Example inventory request
• Example data search request

The OBIS-SEAMAP data is uploaded into OBIS via DiGIR. As DiGIR is a pull service (meaing you request a DiGIR provider to get data), you will need to write some scripts to get the OBIS-SEAMAP data (see the example pages above).

At this moment, OBIS-SEAMAP does not accept data submission from you via DiGIR. See 'Contribute' page for more details if you are interested in contributing your data to OBIS-SEAMAP.

Although OBIS-SEAMAP does not implement full-fledged RESTful services, it provides a convenient and efficient way to get a list of datasets or species that meet your criteria, which can be described as a simplefied version of REST (Representational State Transfer); hence we call it REST-style services.

Once you constructed the appropriate URL, you can use the same single URL to get the up-to-date list of datasets or species at your convenience.

The list can be obtained in several formats including:

• as CSV (ready to be consumed by Microsoft Excel)
• as JSON (convenient to incorporate the results into your own web site)
• as XML (standard format for data exchange over the Internet)

Below are several examples of URLs for the REST-style services.

• Endangered marine mammals found in your (imagenary) study area off US East Coasts in XML
• Corresponding dataset list in XML

The examples above will return four whales from 13 datasets as of 2011-05-06. Note that these lists can change as these requests are handled dynamically and get up-to-date results returned.

If you would like to get a list of species or datasets registered in the OBIS-SEAMAP database at once, there are couple of ways to achieve this.

• Complete list of species on a static HTML page
• Complete list of datasets on a static HTML page
• Inventory of datasets whose DIF metadata are available
  Note: DIF is a metadata format adopted in GCMD

The last link returns a XML document suitable for scripting. A DIF metadata for a specific dataset can be obtained from:
http://seamap.env.duke.edu/seamap2.5/utility/gcmd_metadata.php?entry_id=xxx
where xxx is Entry_ID (e.g. seamap427).

This experimental, advanced service will be coming soon.
The idea is that you can directly connect to the OBIS-SEAMAP database through your ArcGIS Desktop (ver. 10 or later).

• OBIS-SEAMAP database for ArcGIS

Please consult us if you are interested in this plan.