On 30th June 2020 the polar data community gathered for the first online bi-monthly meeting to discuss and move forward with improving data sharing and interoperability. Brought together by the Arctic Data Committee, Standing Committee on Antarctic Data Management, the Southern Ocean Observing System, the Arctic Observing Summit Working Group 4, the Global Cryosphere Watch and the World Data System, around 60 participants worked on the development of new polar data policies and improving ways in which data are described to make them more findable. This event builds on work that has been done at previous meetings, most recently in Helsinki in November 2019 at the Polar Data Forum III.
The Swiss Polar Institute contributed to discussions about aligning the rationales and objectives of new polar data policies with those of other international organisations. Two other breakout groups led by POLDER and the ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group worked on improving community-agreed use of vocabularies and semantics to describe data, as well as providing a one-stop place for discovering polar data.
Proceedings of the workshop have now been published.