During the Polar Data Forum III in Helsinki, November 2019, the Polar Data Enhancement Research group (POLDER) held two days of workshops to explore the feasibility of using schema.org and its associated technologies to support federated metadata search for polar-relevant metadata catalogues.
During the meeting we agreed on the following:
- That data curators in our community should be improving the discoverability of their datasets by implementing schema.org, following the guidance of the science-on-schema.org community. This will make their datasets visible to existing and new metadata crawlers, such as Google’s Dataset Search.
- That our community should contribute to the existing conversations on schema.org extensions that are happening throughscience-on-schema.org, the Earth Science Information Partnership schema.org cluster, bioschemas.org, andgeoschemas.org
- That the tools for developing a community-specific federated search are developing rapidly, so that once a significant number of our data centres have implemented schema.org, it is likely that there will be a clearer path to developing our own federated search.
- That we will continue to contribute to global conversations on schema.org in the earth and other natural sciences.
Are you keen to join us? POLDER is a working group of the Arctic Data Committee, Standing Committee on Antarctic Data Management, and the Southern Ocean Observing System but we welcome members from outside these organisations. We want input from everyone active in this space.
Please join the POLDER mailing list at https://airtable.com/shrBliHbFTInYLu48. (This form adds you to the SOOS contact management system. When it asks you to which Working Group you’d like to join, please select “Polar Data Enhancement Research (POLDER)” and you will not get spam about other SOOS projects.)
Many thanks,
Pip Bricher and the POLDER team