In  2020, the Florida RESTORE Act Centers of Excellence Program, managed by the Florida Institute of Oceanography, funded the establishment of the West Florida Shelf Standardized Mapping Framework Center of Excellence at the University of Florida. The purpose of this Center of Excellence is to build a process for and get community agreement on a framework to support effective and dynamic aggregation of current and future benthic mapping data.

The Florida Marine Data Hub supports this effort by collating knowledge on marine data. It addresses two of the goals of the Center of Excellence, namely to review existing and successful frameworks for marine data integration and distribution around the world, and to review existing standards, protocols, and guidelines for data collection, integration, and distribution.