Background
During the first meeting of the joint SAON/IASC Arctic Data Committee in Potsdam in 2014 an effort was initiated to map the Arctic Data System. The hard lessons learned during the International Polar Year was that polar data are highly heterogeneous, both of nature but also in the context of management. This makes it difficult to find and use existing data which in turn leads to underutilisation of the knowledge embedded in data. Other consequences of this is increased environmental footprint of science, underutilisation of the public investment in science etc.
Understanding the Arctic Data System
Following the initial meeting in Potsdam, the mapping activity shifted from an Arctic perspective to a Polar perspective and is now referred to as Mapping the Polar Data Ecosystem. The EU-funded project Arctic PASSION has been able to facilitate the process of establishing a relationship with the Polar Data Community through enabling representatives of the data centres to maintain the information gathered. The system is set up to visualise relationships where data centres are either sources for information or aggregators of information (see figure below). Through this an overview of technologies used for machine data discovery and data access is established
Getting involved
The information gathered above is important to understand how to further develop the aggregating services of the SAON Data Portal (see figure below). This is an aggregator in the sense that it doesn’t hold any data but relies on standardised data discovery records and access mechanisms to populate a catalogue.
If you are the manager of a data center that organises polar data, you may already have been contacted with a request to share your information in the portal. If this is not the case, and if you are interested in sharing your information, please contact the SAON Secretariat (jan.rene.larsen@amap.no).