Résumé
Most fisheries data sets managed by the IOTC are in the public domain.These data sets are accessible and well described but currently hard to locate outside the IOTC website and require an improved description for facilitating their use, e.g., making explicit the license rights, the data structure, the codifications used, and specifying available Web Services to access or subset the data. Metadata can be of great help to the users and also improve the citation of data management work with digital object identifers (DOI) and data papers. Moreover, similar data sets are man- aged by the other Regional Fisheries Management Organizations and it would be helpful to standardize (meta-)data formats and access protocols at a global scale. In this paper, we present a method based on standards for metadata and data interoperability which enables a rich description of data sets by complying with widely used standards. We showcase how it is possible with these standards and the related applications which implement them to better describe and discover fisheries and stock assessment data as well as to build additional services like data access and visualization tools.