Polder

Advancing Federated Metadata Search for Polar Science

For decades, the aspiration to enable a single-window metadata search has been widely shared across polar science and research communities. However, the realization of this vision has proven elusive due to the highly distributed and diverse nature of data collection in the polar regions. National programs, international initiatives, and disciplinary research groups all contribute to a rich but fragmented landscape of metadata catalogues—currently numbering nearly one hundred. This dispersion significantly hinders efficient data discovery, as researchers must navigate multiple, often incompatible, catalogues to locate relevant datasets.

POLDER has been established to address this challenge by investigating practical pathways to implement federated search capabilities across this technologically heterogeneous, globally distributed ecosystem. Federated search refers to a system that allows users to query multiple metadata catalogues simultaneously, without the need to physically aggregate or replicate metadata. This approach minimizes the technical overhead and avoids common pitfalls associated with metadata harvesting, such as inconsistencies in vocabulary usage and the difficulty of maintaining synchrony between original and translated records.

After thorough investigation and consultation with domain experts, POLDER has identified schema.org as a promising solution for enabling lightweight metadata interoperability. Schema.org provides a flexible, web-based vocabulary that can act as a bridging format across diverse metadata standards. Its adoption allows source catalogues to expose their metadata in a common structure that can be easily indexed by centralized search tools, without requiring major changes to their underlying systems. See the resources page to learn how we recommend implementation! 

POLDER Timeline

The Polar Data Search was originally launched in 2021 at the Arctic Science Summit Week -Arctic Observing Summit in Tromso, Norway. At its inception it was named the Pilot Polar Federated Search (PPFS). In parallel, we worked with stakeholders to develop best practice guidelines for implementing schema.org across polar data catalogues. These efforts aimed to lay the groundwork for a scalable, sustainable, and inclusive federated search infrastructure that enhances data accessibility and reuse for the entire polar research community.

To learn more about the PPFS process, the WDS-ITO team published an article titled "Polar federated search: New infrastructure to support the polar community" - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polar.2023.100947

After a year of piloting, the PPFS project was a success! So we 'hard launched' the interface. The following year POLDER worked to have interested data repositories utilize the best practices to complete schema.org implementation, and garnered feedback on features/ look and feel of the PFS. Through this consultation phase, POLDER recieved feedback that the name 'Polar Federated Search' was not intuitive for researchers to remember. After voting and more community consultation, the POLDER WG decided that they prefered the name 'Polar Data Search' with the tagline 'Making Polar data FAIR'. 

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The POLDER Working Group operates through a fully democratic and community-driven process. All development priorities, design decisions, and feature implementations emerge directly from the needs and input of the polar data community. This participatory model is enacted primarily through the Polar to Global (P2G) hackathons, which serve as open, collaborative forums for discussion, prototyping, and consensus-building. Every element of the POLDER initiative—from metadata standards to interface functionality—is shaped by collective decision-making, ensuring that the resulting tools are grounded in real-world user needs and reflect the shared priorities of researchers, data managers, and institutions across the polar science domain.

Credit: Sebastiaan Swart

Acronyms