NEPTUNE Canada Instruments Interface Requirements

The NEPTUNE Canada regional cabled observatory will be installed in the North East Pacific in 2007 and 2008. The observatory is going to represent an extension of the Internet under the Ocean. If all goes as planned, in about two years, six distinct locations of scientific interest will share about 200 instruments to be made available to the science community. The data from the instruments will be public and open. Interactive, direct access will be restricted to privileged users so as to avoid contention, effects on the environment and disruption of on-going survey programs. In order to efficiently manage the acquisition, testing, integration, installation, operation and maintenance of so many diverse devices, a significant amount of standardization is going to be necessary. This paper will describe the salient features of our instrument acceptance policy, the principles that we are following and why they represent a necessary approach to ensuring the manageability and scalability of the observatory. Requirements covering connectivity, communication, hardware quality, data format and meta data completeness are described. Also included are the considerations covering aspects of maintainability and operability