Details

Published: 21 September 2020

The workshop was held on 5th November 2020, 13:00 - 15:30 UTC. The list of the participants is found here.

Introductory remarks, overview of recent developments and objectives for the meeting series can be found in the documentation from the first workshop on 30th June 2020. An introduction to the workshop is found as this recording by Peter Pulsifer from the first workshop on 30th June 2020.

The (reconstructed) agenda was *):

1. Welcome, Housekeeping and Move into break-out rooms

• Plans for next Polar Data Forum
• Adding Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure team as a co-owner of this workshop/hackaton
• Engaging in SAON ROADS process (Arctic)

Semantics for the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainability

Pier Luigi Buttigieg and Rebekah Ingram 

Presentation on dataset definitions and the progress on getting community input for the data, information, and (digital) knowledge definitions in the Implementation Plan of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021 – 2030 (v2.0)

• Data: A set of values, symbols, or signs (recorded on any type of medium) that represent one or more properties of an entity. For example, the numbers generated by a sensor, values derived from a model or analysis, text entered into a survey, or the raw text of a document.
• Information: Products derived from data that lead to a greater understanding of an entity. For example, (i) the interpretation of a range of data from an array of conductivity sensors across the Arctic Ocean that informs us about that ocean’s salinity range or (ii) the narrative text of a report on harmful algal blooms that informs the reader on the timing of these blooms
• Knowledge: An abstract representation (i.e. a mental model) of an entity  which: (i) is constructed from a substantial collection of information, (ii) grants its bearer reliable familiarity with that entity, and (iii) can be used to reason and take action about that entity. For example, an expert with knowledge about the salinity range of the Arctic Ocean (constructed from large amounts of information on the topic) would be able to reason that a salinity value of 43% is a likely error, rather than a real measurement
• Indigenous and local knowledge: Refers to the understandings, skills and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings. For rural and Indigenous peoples, local knowledge informs decision-making about fundamental aspects of day-to-day life. This knowledge is integral to a cultural complex that also encompasses language, systems of classification, resource use practices, social interactions, ritual and spirituality.
• Digital knowledge: Knowledge, which has been encoded in a machine-readable and actionable form.

Break-out sessions

A joint session between Working Group 1 Federated Search and Working Group 2 Vocabularies and Semantics. The sessions were hosted by POLDER and the ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group, respectively.

RDA’s Schema Crosswalk

Chantelle Verhey

Presentation on the RDA work on cross-walking existing metadata fields to schema.org.  

• Any other products that would be useful for the community?
• Announcement of Intro to SDO Doc, comments/questions/concerns?

Roadmap for 2021

With 2020 drawing to a close, now is a good opportunity to plan out the broad shape of our activities for 2021, to make sure that POLDER, the Arctic Semantics Group, and the Polar To Global workshops are making strong progress towards interoperability in metadata that will help us get to true federated metadata search. 

Possible items for our roadmap (subject to group discussion):

• Finalise and publish our best practice guidance for schema.org implementation
• Expand our collection of template schema.org records for diverse data types
• Update the matrix of metadata harvesting relationships, probably via a to-be-developed web interface that feeds the graph of relationships
  • We will be asking people to update their information very early in the year
  • Beta version of the graph here: http://staging.arctic-data-ecosystem.apps.nsidc.org/harvest 
• Finalise the paper of recommendations for polar data managers
• Publish the paper on the results of the harvesting relationships (after the matrix update)

Best Practice Documentation

• Decision time. Let’s make a list of mandatory fields for our best practice documentation
  • Do we want to have fields that are “mandatory if applicable”? 
  • Do we want to have fields that are “mandatory for purpose”?
  • Do we want to make it mandatory to fill in one of a subset of options?
  • Agree on a standard term for people to fill in if they really can’t fill in a mandatory field because the answer is irrelevant or unknown (e.g. “N/A”, “unknown)
• Potential fields that we might want to make mandatory:
  • Title
  • Author(s)
  • Owner(s)
  • Spatial information 
  • Temporal information
  • Lineage/authoritative source/sameAs
  • Citation
  • Copyright/ownership statement
  • URL for landing page
  • Unique identifier
  • Version
  • What have we missed?

Finalising discussions on specific fields from the September meeting

• Which temporal information formats will we support?
• Which spatial information formats will we support?
• How to define licencing/ownership statement/copyright

Close

Working Group 3 Policy. Hosted by SCADM, SOOS and the Arctic Data Committee and led by Stein Tronstad.

Reporting from the workshop:

• Recordings from the joint part of the meeting is found here (the recording of the session starts at around 00:53:30)
• Recordings from break-out sessions:
  
  • Joint session: The recording of the session is found here (the recording of the session starts at around 02:20:00)
  • The recording from the session is found here.

*) The original agenda has unfortunately been lost and has been reconstructed.

Details

Published: 21 September 2020

The second workshop was held on 2nd September 2020, 13:00 - 16:00 UTC.

The agenda is found here.

The list of the participants is found here.

Reporting from the workshop:

• The kickoff presentation to the workshop series was help by ADC chair Peter L. Pulsifer on 30th June 2020 and is found here.
• Working sessions were:
  • A joint session between Working Group 1 Federated Search and Working Group 2 Vocabularies and Semantics. The sessions were hosted by POLDER and the ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group, respectively.
    • Draft meeting notes are found here.
    • The recording (audio) of the session is found here.
  • Working Group 3 Policy. Hosted by SCADM, SOOS and the Arctic Data Committee and lead by Stein Tronstad.
    • The recording from the session is found here.
    • The session chat is found here.

Details

Published: 30 July 2020

2nd September 13:00-15:30 UTC

During the Third Polar Data Forum (PDF) held in Helsinki in November of 2019, members of the Polar Data Community gathered to share information and knowledge and to make practical progress towards greater data sharing and interoperability. PDF III followed on a series of meetings that have resulted in continuing advancements in the areas of federated search, identification and development of shared vocabularies and formal semantics, data policy, community building and other topics. Since PDF III, the dialogue has continued. In March and early April, the Arctic data community met during the online Arctic Observing Summit (https://aos2020agenda.org/). The Standing Committee on Arctic Data Management (SCADM) and members of the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) Program have met regularly. There is broad agreement between these groups and the IASC-SAON Arctic Data Committee (ADC) that meeting more frequently will help us to continue making practical progress on our shared goals.
 
During these challenging times, meeting in person is not feasible.  However, recent online events have demonstrated that we can successfully collaborate using virtual tools.  
 
We would like to invite you to join us online on 2nd September 13:00 - 15:30 UTC to continue our efforts to enhance polar data sharing and interoperability.  This is an online workshop in a planned series of bi-monthly online workshops convened by the ADC, SCADM, SOOS, the Arctic Observing Summit Working Group 4, the Global Cryosphere Watch, and the World Data System on behalf of the polar data community.

Due to the constraints of our virtual platform, participation is limited. Registration is required. Connection information for the virtual meeting will be provided to registered participants closer to the event time.  

To register, please complete the form found here
 
Draft agenda:
 
1.  Meeting kickoff (plenary) (5 minutes): Introductory remarks, overview of recent developments and objectives for the meeting series can be found in the documentation from the first workshop on 30th June 2020. An introduction to the workshop is found as this recording by Peter Pulsifer from the first workshop on 30th June 2020.
 
2. Working Sessions (2.5 hours)

Note: Due to mutual interests, Working Groups 1 & 2 will start the meeting together to discuss common interests (e.g. schema.org metadata vocabularies). If desired, groups will separate.

Breakout Working Group 1: Federated Search. Hosted by POLDER (https://polder.info)
& Breakout Working Group 2: Vocabularies and Semantics. Hosted by the ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group (https://arcticdc.org/activities/core-projects/vocabularies-and-semantics-wg)

NB: POLDER has a new GitHub Repo so that we can keep track of changes to our template schema.org example and start putting things into a best practice document. Join us!

13:05-13:35 : Demonstration of a thematic portal for Arctic repositories using the new DataONE Plus service, by Matt Jones. Followed by discussion.
There are roughly 100,000 Arctic-ish (> 50 degrees North) datasets in 26 repositories that are currently in DataONE, including many that are on the matrix worksheet from POLDER. Matt and his team have been harvesting schema.org from some of those, and other metadata records from others. It would also be interesting to see if more repositories were ready with published schema.org records to be harvested. Here's a summary of the current content -- Pangaea has the most datasets, as can be seen in the graph. The DataONE Plus service also provides a set of metadata completeness metrics following the FAIR principles that I think would be of interest. We could create a similar portal for Antarctic data, or a combined Arctic and Antarctic portal if that makes sense, as well as thematic clusters of data.

13:35-14:20 : Describing the contents of a dataset

Continue discussions on how best to describe 

• less structured data types, such as interviews, and 
• derived variables, such as remote sensing products and model outputs, 
• Structured datasets without relevant controlled vocabularies

In preparation, please follow the three links in this comment on the ESIP GitHub page to catch up on a parallel discussion in the earth sciences community. It is unlikely that we will resolve these issues today so the conversation will likely focus on a process for resolving them (perhaps a small group discussion?) 

If there is time, some discussion on what level of granularity we want to be able to describe datasets at. 

14:20 - 14:30 Tea Break

14:30 - 15:10 Time, Space, and Licencing

Tidying up our recommendations on documenting 

• time (including gaps in time and geological time), 
• space, and 
• licensing.

Through this discussion, we will update the template created in Helsinki.

15:10 - 15:30 Best Practice Documentation

What do we want to include in a best practice guide for implementing schema.org? Can we create a skeleton structure for a document so that we can work on it between meetings?

Breakout Working Group 3: Policy. Hosted by SCADM, SOOS and the Arctic Data Committee (Stein Tronstad, lead)

• 13:05-14:10

  During this session we will aim to develop an outline for a “Polar Data Policy Recommendations” document, based on our discussions during the June 30 workshop. The intended purpose of such a document will be to identify the most important concerns (rationales) for polar data policies to address, to identify needs for alignment between the existing polar data policies, and to provide recommendations on the core data management principles that should be laid down by future revised data policies.

  Our ambition is to have a complete document ready by the end of this year, as an input to further discussions within the interested communities (SCADM, ADC, SOOS and others). Everyone interested is welcome to contribute.

  The outcomes of the June 30 data policy session can be found here.

  As a starting point for discussions an initial document outline can be found here.

   

Kind regards,
 
Peter Pulsifer, Arctic Data Committee / AOS Working Group 4
Pip Bricher, SOOS / POLDER
Taco de Bruin, SCADM / IODE
Ruth Duerr, ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group
Öystein Godöy, Global Cryosphere Watch, ADC-IARPC-SCADM Vocabularies and Semantics Working Group
Stein Tronstad, SCADM/ADC
Jan Rene Larsen, SAON
Rorie Edmunds, World Data System
Marten Tacoma, ADC/SCADM

Details

Published: 29 July 2020