NSIDC’s cryospheric data and information: Supporting science and society for 40 years Donna J. Scott, Julia Collins, Peter Pulsifer SciDataCon September 13, 2016 Celebrating our 40th Anniversary 1976-2016

Points of Discussion NSIDC Overview Connecting global audiences with open information Connecting global audiences by establishing interoperable systems Challenges in making global connections SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

The National Snow and Ice Data Center… SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

NSIDC affiliations and sponsorship Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences World Data System Main sponsors: National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Science Foundation National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Connecting Global Audiences - Open information Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis Invaluable 40-year sea ice record for climate change studies Purposely presented in an easy to understand way for a broad audiences Press, scientists, policy makers, educators, general public 2.5 million visits annually https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Connecting Global Audiences – Open Information Satellite Observations of Arctic Change Presents data in meaningful way for researchers beyond the cryospheric community Interpretation of data visualization, promoting understanding to audiences beyond science Interactive display lets users explore themselves https://nsidc.org/soac SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Connecting Global Audiences – Data Diversity Physical Social Sciences ELOKA (Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic) provides data management to facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and knowledge. Edge of the shorefast ice at Barrow. Credit Matthew Druckenmiller Existing feature vs. safety of the ice iteself Data types Observations (e.g., sea ice conditions) Multimedia (Recorded or transcribed interviews, pictures, & video) Local sensor network data Physical artifacts Ice floe observations merged with MODIS sea ice data Differing perspectives encourage dialogue between Indigenous experts and scientists around the world SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Connecting Global Audiences - Interoperability Data Discovery Greater emphasis on search and download functionality to improve the global community’s access to metadata and data. Contributes to federated data discovery tools, offering single-query search for international, interdisciplinary Arctic data. NSIDC Search Arctic Data Explorer NASA DAAC funded NSIDC provides metadata delivery services to support both internal (NSIDC search) and external (ADE) data discovery and access tools. Moving to ISO 19115 to represent our data allows us to create richer metadata that includes URIs for accessing the data directly via FTP or other web services (those are available in more limited situations --e.g., Polaris). NSF funded SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Connecting Global Audiences – Interoperability Open-source Years of development Active internet community Robust support for OGC protocols Easy-to-use GUI for configuration Connecting Global Audiences – Interoperability OGC Endpoints GeoServer chosen because Providing OGC endpoints makes it much easier for people to work with our data Programmatic access (e.g. OpenLayers in web applications) Interactive access via desktop GIS tools (e.g. QGIS) OGC = Open Geospatial Consortium OGC defines standards that are supported by a variety of applications. We originally used MapServer (developed at the University of Minnesota) to support our OGC-compliant services. We're now moving to GeoServer (see reasons on slide). Our GeoServer installation will be used to store data layers that can be used by a variety of applications at NSIDC to create data visualizations NASA BEDI and share data. Future versions will configure GeoServer instances to offer WCS support to allow users to browse data, subset, and then download the underlying data (e.g. GeoTIFF format). SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Challenges – Physical & Social Data Missing data Value added products like ASINA and SOAC Informing the general public and novice users about unexpected data problems Displaying diverse data in a meaningful way when they are provided via different protocols and in different formats is labor intensive Recent experiences in updating data are proving difficult as data producers change their data, and it is no longer compatible with previous code. Social science data Where the satellite and in-situ missions are often in the public domain with unrestricted access, social science data can be highly sensitive and require adherence to ethical protocols Seamless Data Management Restricted Data Intellectual Property Open Data None of this comes without challenges SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System Seamless Data Management Restricted Data Intellectual Property Open Data Seamless Data Management Restricted Data Intellectual Property Open Data

Challenges - Interoperability GeoServer Performance The challenge we are "watching" for is performance (user load). Considerations are needed for developing the workflow to allocate resources on an as-needed basis. Metadata A need for consistent metadata Interoperability ( "inclusive metadata" does kind of wrap it all up!) My image with the table illustrates in a simplified way the idea that repositories are not yet providing consistent metadata content. This makes it difficult to maximize the benefit of federated search tools that automatically harvest metadata from multiple sources. Without complete and consistent metadata, search tools cannot support a full range of functionality that improves search results and, by extension, access to the data. Also, more human effort is required to configure the harvest and ingest processes when the information being harvested is not consistent and complete. Challenges Need to support multiple service protocols (my second image) Another challenge to creating federated discovery and access tools is the range of protocols used by repositories to deliver their metadata. For example, some repositories provide information streams compliant with OGC protocols, others conform to the OpenSearch protocol, others use the OAI-PMH protocol to deliver metadata. NSIDC attempts to be flexible in both the delivery protocols it supports as well as the format of the metadata content. We currently have support in various degrees for OAI-PMH, OpenSearch, OGC, and OPeNDAP. Additionally, we store our metadata components in a relational database, allowing us to package the metadata as XML or JSON content conforming to ISO 19115, DIF, and custom formats. Repositories are not yet providing consistent metadata content. This makes it difficult to maximize the benefit of federated search tools that automatically harvest metadata from multiple sources. Need to support multiple service protocols. SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

Thank You! Questions? SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System