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firstname: Mark
lastname: Parsons
affiliation: World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder
country: USA
papertitle: The Challenge of and Approach to IPY Data Management
abstract: The legacy of the International Geophysical Year and past International Polar Years is in the scientific data collected. The upcoming IPY will result in an unprecedented collection of physical, biological, and social science data from the Polar Regions. To realize the full scientific and interdisciplinary utility of these data it is essential to consider the design of data management systems early in the experimental planning process. This presentation will present an array of high-level data management considerations for the IPY including cross-disciplinary data access, essential documentation, system guidance, and long-term data archiving, and how the IPY has begun to address these issues.
Some of the basic questions IPY must address include whether researchers will be able to find all the data relevant to their research and identify relationships between data sets. Will they be able to merge and integrate different data sets across experiments and disciplines? Will they be able to subset, visualize, and transform relevant data? Will local communities be able to gain and maintain appropriate rights and access to their information and knowledge while still contributing to IPY? Will future researchers be able to retrieve IPY data in 2050?
The IPY has established two primary mechanisms to address these questions and other issues related to data management. The first is an international Data Policy and Management Subcommittee. The ICSU/WMO Joint Committee for IPY created this subcommittee as a diverse group of data management and disciplinary experts, and charged them with determining the overall IPY data strategy, policy and organizational structure for IPY data management. The second IPY data management mechanism is an IPY Data and Information Service (IPYDIS), which is responsible for implementing the strategy defined by the data subcommittee.
The IPYDIS involves dozens of archives and institutions around the world. A central data coordination office helps coordinate the IPYDIS and is developing a union metadata catalog for an internationally distributed data management system. The coordination office is working with individual IPY projects and clusters to ensure appropriate centralized data description and distributed archiving. Regional or discipline-specific "affinity centers" that comprise the IPYDIS will manage and archive IPY data. For example the Frozen Ground Data Center at the WDC, Boulder is working closely with the IPY permafrost cluster, while the proposed Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge in the Arctic could coordinate community-based monitoring data. Other affinity centers include Russian data, Chinese data, remote sensing data, geospatial data infrastructures (regional and global), paleoenvironmental data, marine biological data, bibliographic data, and others.
The data subcommittee had its first meeting in early March 2006 followed by a more open workshop to determine the detailed implementation of the IPYDIS. There will was also a town hall discussion on the IPY data policy and strategy at the European Geosciences Union in April 2006. This talk will present an overview of the results of these meetings in order to more fully describe the IPY approach to Data Management.
Ultimately a long-term test of the legacy of IPY will be the quality, availability, and usability of the data collected. IPY is working hard to ensure that legacy.
keywords: interdisciplinary data, international exchange, data policy, international polar year
typedname: Mark A. Parsons
date: 30 Jan 2006
proposal: Submit Paper Abstract
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