Abstract
The sharing of knowledge, experience, and lessons learned facilitates solving common problems and accelerating the development of the MRE industry. In order to increase the dissemination of such information, the US Department of Energy, through its national laboratories has engaged the international MRE community to understand online information needs. Six thematic needs were determined: outreach & communication, discoverability, data integrity, tools & codes, accessibility & security, and best practices & guidelines that lead to a vision for an online information system: PRIMRE (the Portal and Repository for Information on Marine Renewable Energy). PRIMRE is an online framework that will enable all MRE stakeholders to store, organize and access broad sets of information, data, and tools. The PRIMRE framework aims to be a centralized collection and dissemination point for MRE information, an access point to discover and access online tools, a place to discover existing knowledge, and an honest and neutral broker for the use of existing data.