going glocal—polar data in a global infrastructure

Unless otherwise noted, the slides in this presentation are licensed by Mark A. Parsons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Going Glocal—Polar Data in a Global Infrastructure

Mark A. Parsons 0000-0002-7723-0950 Secretary General

Polar Data Forum 2 Waterloo, Canada 27 October 2015

Infrastructure is hard to conceive and describe because when it works, it’s transparent, ubiquitous, and embedded in our daily work.

Dynamics of Infrastructure Edwards, et al. 2007 Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design.

• Infrastructures become “ubiquitous, accessible, reliable, and transparent” as they mature.

• Systems Networks Inter-networks • “system-building, characterized by the deliberate and successful

design of technology-based services.” • “technology transfer across domains and locations results in

variations on the original design, as well as the emergence of competing systems.”

• Finally, “a process of consolidation characterized by gateways that allow dissimilar systems to be linked into networks.”

Not what, but When is infrastructure?

Not what, but When and Who is infrastructure?

Bridges and Gateways

Gateways are often wrongly understood as “technologies,” i.e. hardware or software alone. A more accurate approach conceives them as combining a technical solution with a social choice, i.e. a standard, both of which must be integrated into existing users’ communities of practice. Because of this, gateways rarely perform perfectly. — Edwards et al. 2007

Infrastructure is

Relationships, interactions, and connections between people, technologies, and institutions

(that helps data flow and be useful)

Research Data Alliance

Vision Researchers and innovators openly share data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.

Mission RDA builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data.

Glocality—Bridging across scales

Glocalization “means the simultaneity—the co-presence—of both universalizing and and particularizing tendencies.”

— Roland Robertson

Most overarching messages from ASSW (IARPC) emphasize glocal work.• Need greater urgency and awareness of the global importance of changes

in the Arctic.

• Must anticipate not respond to changes in the Arctic. This requires sustained observations and improved understanding of local, regional and global processes.

• The rapidly changing Arctic initiates changes that cascade through the global system … Linkages across disciplines, scales, and diverse knowledge systems must be addressed.

• Understanding … requires increased international scientific cooperation, including contributions from non-Arctic states.

• Need more effective and appropriate use and dissemination of local and traditional knowledge.

• Sustainable infrastructure development and innovation to strengthen the resilience of Arctic communities requires a collaborative approach.

Antarctic Treaty System

Human Presence

Eyes on the Sky

Dynamic Earth

Life on the

Precipice

Antarctic Atmosphere

Southern Ocean and

Sea Ice

Ice Sheet and

Sea Level Ecological Drivers

Stressors

Governance and Policy

Conservation

Global Weather

and Climate

World Ocean

Global Biosphere Space

Invasions

Sun Ionosphere

SCAR Horizon Scan (from the summary presentation)

Examples of glocal data leadership from the Poles

• Open and ethical sharing

• Data discovery across difference

• New levels of data integration and reuse

Different meaning based on different sense

• Example of defining location of “floe edge” based on Remote Sensing perspective vs. local experience

• See eloka-arctic.org

http://eloka-arctic.org/communities/sanikiluaq/

Some Challenges

• Are the poles heard?

• We’re still a small community with limited capacity

• Discovery systems still overly simplistic and catalog/registry based OR very heavyweight and top down

• Funding alignment.

Some Challenges

• Are the poles heard?

• We’re still a small community with limited capacity

• Discovery systems still overly simplistic and catalog/registry based OR very heavyweight and top down.

• Funding alignment.

Some examples of ways forward

1. Continue what you are doing

2. Join the Research Data Alliance

3. Become a certified repository and help define what that means.

4. Broaden the concept of “domain repositories” in international discourse. (RDA Domain Repository IG, WDS, CDF)

5. Bring polar use cases and solutions to discovery and brokering systems (RDA Brokering Governance WG; GEOSS; GSDI)

6. Put Persistent Identifiers on data, documents, people, organisations, instruments—Everything! (RDA, DataCite, ORCID, CASRAI, etc.)

7. Share lessons learned nationally and internationally.

COPDESS

Registering and Certifying Repositories

‹#›An Area of Convergence and Agreement

Internet Domain

nodes with IP numbers

packages being exchanged

standardized protocols

Data Domain

objects with PID numbers

objects being exchanged

standardized protocols

Slide courtesy P. Wittenberg from L. Lannom from D. Clark

PICUser

PICUser

PICGuidelines

& Norms

PICToolbox

PICToolbox

Agree

Agree

PICData

PICData

PICData

PICData

PICData

PICPartners

CurationPreservation

PICData

PICData

PICData

DirectHigh-level

Services

PICData

A Conceptual Architecture for the Polar Information Commons

27The Research Data Alliance Community Today

Total RDA Community Members: 3378

from 104 countries

56 Working and Interest Groups

Plenary 71-3 March 2016Tokyo, Japan

12-16 September 2016in

Denver, Colorado, USA

Info: [email protected]

@resdatall

mailto:[email protected]

going glocal—polar data in a global infrastructure

Data & Analytics