The SCAR - COMNAP

S15/O01 eAntarctica: From data management to information portals Belbin L. Australian Antarctic Division, Kingston, Australia Scientific research is driven by data. Data is valued by the scientific community for its ability to prove or disprove hypotheses. Data can be valued independently by the cost of collection and processing; Antarctic data is extremely expensive. It is therefore anomalous, that up to the last decade, little thought has been given to preserving these data in a form that facilitates discovery and effective use in perpetuity. The development of the Internet and subsequent development of the World Wide Web have initiated one of the most significant technical, social and intellectual revolutions in modern culture. Until the Internet, the repository of information was the library. One had to physically get to a library, then use either the subject or author catalogues to find relevant information. A successful search required physically locating the material then hoping that the information sought was accessible. In 2004, you can search a volume of freely available information from your desk in a way that would have stunned anyone twenty years ago. Those aged over fifty may suggest that there is too much irrelevant information out there for the Internet to be helpful. That may have been true as little as five years ago, but it is not true any longer. Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo® work. Results from these engines over the past few years continue to stagger me with their speed and relevance. How is this relevant to scientific data? While everyone knows that the library is a repository of information with a catalogue, the same has not been true of the data that generated the publications. Scientists have assumed that they knew who was doing what, and that data could often be obtained via the author. The Web has clearly demonstrated that there is more (relevant) information out there than most astute observers could have imagined. The increasing emphasis on multinational and multidisciplinary research also highlights the need to expand horizons. The SCAR/COMNAP Joint Committee on Antarctic Data Management (JCADM) was founded in 1997 to address Article III.1.c of the Antarctic Treaty "scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available." JCADM's priority was to create an electronic catalogue of Antarctic science data. This catalogue is called, the Antarctic Master Directory (AMD: http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/Data/portals/amd/). JCADM recruited National Antarctic Data Centres (NADC) and made them responsible for cataloging their national Antarctic science datasets. As with the library, the data catalogue would enable Antarctic science data to be easily discovered and effectively used. The library catalogue contains information on the author, subject, publisher, date and location on shelves. This is metadata. The AMD also includes fields such as spatial and temporal extents, data quality and usage constraints. The catalogue entry is more like an abstract. JCADM is now focusing more on data. Some NADCs have added value to data by generating composite online databases such as an Antarctic biodiversity database. These databases enable users to search and subset data on all criteria, and to expose these data to international information portals such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (http://www.gbif.org) that are using the latest Internet technology: Web Services. Abstract: S15/O02 The Joint Committee on Antarctic Data Management (JCADM) past, present and future S15/O02 The Joint Committee on Antarctic Data Management (JCADM) past, present and future