Polar federated search: New infrastructure to support the polar community

Abstract

This paper reports how the World Data System International Technology Office (WDS-ITO) has contributed resources in the Polar Research Data Management community. The office has focused on federated search and data enhancement practices that bridge the gap between data holdings in the Arctic and Antarctic polar research communities and has built a shared catalog characterized by harmonized “dialects'' of metadata standards. The portal, referred to as the Polar Federated Search (PFS) site, is part of a larger set of WDS-ITO polar support activities and allows researchers to find data that has been published in multiple repositories serving both Arctic and Antarctic data (World Data System – International Technology Office, 2022). The portal provides federated search capability through a single interface. The PFS indexes repository landing pages that have been enriched with the addition of semantic markup marrying the best practices from the web publishing world with domain specific metadata. This technique leads to broader discovery, notably by Google Dataset Search, and better reuse of data repository holdings. Increasingly, the base ontology that has been adopted for use in these markup activities is Schema.org (SDO) a simple ontology developed in the commercial sector. This article outlines the steps and progressions made throughout the first year of PFS development, its highlights, and describes how these infrastructures move far beyond metadata discovery to include data integration, analysis, visualization and advanced, reproducible workflows.