The National Polar Data Centers are Key Elements in Connecting Data Providers and Data Users within the Polar Research Community

Most National Polar Research Programs require the data collected to be submitted to a trusted National Polar Data Centre (NPDC). NPDCs will have multiple roles in handling various data types. For data from the same domain as the data center is, the NPDC will manage the data. For data from other domains for which a national domain specific data center exists, the NPDC will play a coordinating role, while for data without a domain-specific host the NPDC will perform basic data management tasks. As a result, the NPDC will have a complete overview of all polar data within a national polar program.

Often, the NPDC will develop and maintain a national polar data portal, which provides access to the data and information of a national program, using this complete overview mentioned before. An example in case is the portal developed by the authors for the Netherlands Polar Program (NPP). This NL-NPDC portal is a tool to assist scientists in describing and providing access to polar data in an internationally standardized way, thus following the FAIR principles. Of course, the portal software is available to the community at large as open source via Github.

While a NPDC may make all the data from a national polar program findable and accessible via one point of access, the user still has to search many different national and/or project portals to get to the required data. Fortunately, NPDCs are also gateways to various international and integrated data access infrastructures. NPDCs from around the globe cooperate in SCAR's Standing Committee on Antarctic Data Management (SCADM) and IASC-SAON's Arctic Data Committee (ADC). These two committees manage and maintain data access infrastructures for the Antarctic resp. Arctic regions.

Yet, as the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) data team found out, for the Southern Ocean alone there are more than 50 major data sources, many of them not directly connected to the existing data infrastructures. SOOS, SCADM and ADC recognized that there is a clear need for a 'federated search' or 'single-window search' mechanism and joined forces to build it.

This presentation will describe the roles of a NPDC and how such a NPDC fits into the bigger infrastructures as built by SCADM and ADC. Current initiatives for federated data search and further data integration will be specifically highlighted.