1. 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

2. 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

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

4. 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

5. 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
SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

6. 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
SciDataCon 2016: Sharing Across Scales and Domains: Polar Data in the Global System

7. 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

8. 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 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

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