It has officially been three years since the launch of the Pilot Polar Federated Search tooling from the Polar Data Discovery Enhancement Research (POLDER) Working Group. Since then, the WDS-ITO team has been hard at work developing the search tool with feedback and input from the POLDER community.
The essence of the tool was to be an open source, lightweight (but powerful), customizable tool where researchers, and stakeholders alike can search across multiple repositories in a single user interface. POLDER believes that the recent groundswell of interest in schema.org, driven by the development of Google’s dataset search, offers a rare opportunity to simplify and connect metadata discovery tools. Schema.org is structured header text that is attached to a dataset’s landing page and that can draw metadata elements from existing metadata standards. It is a lightweight way to share the load of aligning metadata standards that does not require a data centre to alter its systems and infrastructure for managing metadata.
Now, the POLDER WG is working on a communications campaign to socialize the tooling. Part of the communications campaign is a name change. After feedback from community members, there was a common theme that the ‘federated’ name was hard to remember and for those who aren’t familiar with the federated concept, it wasn’t intuitive. As mentioned above, the essence of the tooling is to be guided by community and user input, so the leadership team decided to move ahead with a survey to accept suggestions for a new name and catchphrase!
The POLDER WG with help from the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA) have now completed the rebranding. The Polar Federated Search has officially been changed to the Polar Data Search (PDS) with the winning catchphrase “Collaborating to make polar data FAIR”.
A huge thank you to everyone who made suggestions for the name change, and gave input on the new logo. We hope this marks the beginning of a long and prosperous run for the Polar Data Search.
We are still working with repositories who are interested in being included in the tooling federation. We have updated the about page of the Polar Data Search to include additional supporting information regarding more supporting documentation for the tooling, what exactly to expect from the tolling interface, and what repositories are currently being indexed.
Keep an eye out for more to come! If you are interested in participating in the POLDER WG or keeping up to date with the latest and greatest, please feel free to join the POLDER mailing list. Our mailing list is hosted by the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS), so please subscribe to SOOS and select POLDER as your Working Group. Then you’ll be in the loop for meeting invitations and product announcements.