The 5th Polar Data Forum was a successful event hosted by the British Antarctic Survey on 30th Oct – 3 Nov, 2023. The conference had 157 registered participants (61 in-person, 96 online) representing 32 countries.
The conference began with 2 days of a vessel workshop. During Day 1, participants discussed how to process and manage data regarding polar vessels and observations, sharing experiences utilizing openRVDAS (research vessel data acquisition system) & openVDM. Other challenges observed were limited bandwidth during expeditions, and merits of using controlled vocabularies versus newly created vocabularies in content management systems. Day 2 covered vessel data QA/QC, interoperability, AI experimentation work, and data visualization options such as Grafana.
The following two days consisted of conference presentations. Day 1 of the conference portion had themes such as: general data, FAIR data for the polar regions, tools and technologies for data management and delivery, and vocabularies. The day concluded with a Polar Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group hosted workshop. A guest speaker from the British Oceanographic Data Centre on the frameworks created in the Research Data Alliance-IADOPT WG showed how repositories can implement controlled vocabularies. We progressed to a brief history of the WG, and then discussed challenges repositories face when trying to implement controlled vocabularies. Discussion topics ranged from Indigenous inclusion and data sovereignty, to one-size-fits all approach not necessarily applying to existing vocabularies. Day 2 of the conference included the following topics: new ships and real-time data in low connectivity locations, knowledge mobilization and decision-making, collaborative production of data, information and knowledge, logistical information management. Again, the day ended with a workshop hosted by the Polar Observing Assets Working Group. This workshop was the official launch of a pilot RoPON Observing assets registry. Participants reviewed the pilot’s current state, provided feedback on the look and feel, and gave contextual guidance worth adding to its website.
Various action items are being followed up, such as developing shared guidelines to help researchers create good quality metadata for polar data sets. This should help improve the FAIRness of polar data. The current plan is to have the Polar to Global Online Interoperability and Data Sharing Workshop/Hackathon (P2G) review existing guidelines in use and derive common guidelines based upon them.
- To participate in the creation of common guidelines, the P2G coordinating team is kindly asking you to share any polar metadata guidelines that are currently used by you or your institution. Please upload documents here: by 30th November.
- To participate in the next P2G on the 18th January 2024 20-22 UTC, the agenda, connection information and other meeting documents are found here.
Overall, the conference organizing committee was thrilled with the engagement and participant turnout at Polar Data Forum V.