Environment Climate Data Sweden – ECDS (1)

1. Environment Climate Data Sweden – ECDS(1) Thomas Klein, Barry Broman, Jan Svensson, Britt Frankenberg, and the ECDS-teamSwedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute Abstract Share and benefit from others sharing with you! Environment Climate Data Sweden (ECDS) is a new Swedish service facilitating the search, publication and long-term accessibility of data for environment and climate research. ECDS consists of a clearinghouse mechanism, allowing for the search and publication of relevant data, and a service infrastructure, providing additional support to scientists throughout the whole research process. ECDS is a joint undertaking of the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), in collaboration with the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) of Linköping University. Welcome to our new webpage at www.ecds.se! Our goal is to help researchers find and share environment and climate data. The site will gradually be expanded with content such as tutorials, links and other resources. We are near completion of our new interactive web tool for the search and publication of metadata, with planned release in late spring. ECDS will be the central access point to decentralized data resources: through the portal and the underlying metadata catalogue users will be guided to datasets hosted by contributors. Contributors are encouraged to contact us already now in order to allow for a smooth and quick integration of their metadata in our catalogue. Background An increasing world population, industrial development, globalization and changing weather and climate patterns are exerting enormous pressure on the planet Earth. Science is an integral part of the response, establishing a shared basis of knowledge as well as directly underpinning the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and measures to mitigate, and adapt to, the problems. According to the International Council for Science (ICSU), the flow of, and access to, scientific data and information are critical factors in ensuring the participation of scientists in international research. A recent investigation on the status of sharing of environment and climate data in Sweden (Eklundh, 2008) confirmed that essential requirement. Yet, scientists usually face a number of problems regarding access to and utilization of data they need for their work (Figure 1). Figure 3: Snapshot of the new Environment Climate Data Sweden site. Here you will soon be able to publish information on your own data and search for other contributors’ data. Building upon the experience with previous portals and clearinghouse developments such as the Swedish IPY Portal (International Polar Year, Figure 4), ECDS is now preparing the release of its new portal. The portal will use GeoNetwork as its underlying catalogue application. ECDS is an information broker and depends strongly on the collective engagement of scientists to gradually build a vast catalogue of relevant data. Get engaged – Share your own data and benefit from others sharing with you: Provide your metadata to ECDS and help to boost new scientific findings! Figure 1: Common obstacles regarding access to scientifically relevant data. Environment Climate Data Sweden – Our vision Figure 4: Snapshot of the Swedish IPY Portal (http://ipy.smhi.se/ ). The ECDS-initiative will build upon the work with previous portals and clearinghouse-developments. Polar data from the Swedish IPY-activities will soon be integrated into the new ECDS-Portal. • Environment Climate Data Sweden aims to facilitate full, open and trouble-free access to scientific data and information for the benefit of all, • in line with the needs of national and international science communities and society as a whole, • in line with the visions of, among other, ICSU, UNESCO and GEO, and, • in close cooperation with other stakeholders. Conclusions Universal and equitable access to high quality environmental data and information is essential to ensure a strong scientific participation. Environment Climate Data Sweden is a new service, that will help scientists to share their data with other scientists and to allow them to profit from other scientists sharing data with them. The growing openness of scientists to share their work, together with incentives provided by research funding agencies, will result in a major paradigm shift for scientific collaboration and lead to a wealth of new scientific findings and knowledge, underpinning our response to the major environmental and socioeconomic challenges that mankind and planet Earth are facing. Figure 2: ECDS aims to resolve key issues with scientific data access through a variety of activities. Using a metadata profile based on ISO 19115, ECDS will build a catalogue for available data in the fields of environment and climate. The service will help scientists to find and use others’ data and to share their own data. Furthermore, ECDS will advocate for the full and open sharing of environment and climate data, in line with the governing scientific requirements and the trend of research funding agencies explicitly requiring the publication of data. References Eklundh, 2008: Investigation on “Data for Swedish Research in the fields of environment and climate”. Report to the Swedish Research Council. VR-2008:03, available at www.vr.se Environment Climate Data Sweden, 2011: www.ecds.se GEO, 2011: http://www.earthobservations.org/ GeoNetwork, 2011: http://geonetwork-opensource.org/ ICSU, 2011: http://www.icsu.org/ UNESCO, 2011: http://www.unesco.org/ (1) The ECDS-initiative was previously known under the name SND-KM (Swedish National Data service for Climate and Environment). Contact: Thomas.Klein@smhi.se