1. Description of the Project
The Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (CADIS) has been developed and implemented over the past three years to serve as a portal for meeting the data management needs of the NSF-sponsored Arctic Observing Network (AON). It is a collaborative project involving more than two dozen people from NCAR/EOL, NCAR/CISL, Unidata, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). CADIS has brought accepted community standards, data access and visualization tools, stewardship expertise and vision to develop a data management and support system for AON, creating a foundation for long-term access to data archives, discovery, delivery as well as analysis opportunities to support the Arctic science community. CADIS (http://aoncadis.org/) has become the primary portal for all NSF-supported AON data. This site contains detailed information about all AON projects, meeting summaries, and is the primary gateway to the AON data services.
2. Relationship to the Unidata 2013 Proposal
From time to time, the UPC participates in projects that are consistent with its mission but funded separately from the core program. Such projects are synergistic with the core effort and advance Unidata's goals by broadening participation, providing new capabilities and datasets, enhancing interoperability and broader use of software, and increasing the broader impact of the program by both entraining and diffusing new tools, technologies, and ideas. CADIS activities map on to all six goal areas in the Unidata 2013 proposal.
3. Recent Progress
The project reached a major milestone in fall 2009 with the release and implementation of the user interface for uploading metadata and data via the CADIS Data Portal. Primary features include an advanced metadata authoring tool, web portal, data upload tool, semantic search, dataset download, interoperability with selected arctic archive sites (e.g. NSIDC, NCAR/EOL, Norway (DAMOCLES), British Antarctic Survey) and visualization tools for general project overview information. User support is provided to assist AON investigators with all aspects of the CADIS applications.
CADIS made progress on several related fronts including:
4. Future Plans
Some areas CADIS needs to work on include; improving data searching within the archive itself as well as how researchers outside AON can find AON datasets in CADIS; increasing community awareness of CADIS and its capabilities; developing more effective support for AON social science data and information; organizing data format conversion capabilities and improving map based search and visualization utilities. The AON investigators also recommended that CADIS expand links to other related datasets that will be used when analyzing large scale phenomena.
The support for AON data management will continue to evolve as AON continues to grow and produce a rich legacy of data from the Arctic. CADIS will continue to offer a systematic approach that supports the data providers, while improving access to these data. CADIS will have effective metadata and data entry tools, visualization techniques (map based, parameter based, project based) and improved search capabilities for the discovery and access to this diverse data archive.
There will be the increasing opportunity to link to and/or provide supplementary or supporting datasets that are relevant to AON. These data could include remote sensing data and products (e.g. imagery, ice concentration), integrated datasets produced by the AON PIs or other groups, operational data from state or federal agencies and model results from inter-comparison projects, reanalysis or other special efforts. These datasets would typically be linked via existing web sites and not require CADIS to directly archive the data. Exceptions will be made when the results come directly from AON projects in a case where the data might be lost due to unforeseen circumstances.
5. CADIS Metrics
Investigators have archived 161 data sets from 10 disciplines, and 12 nations in CADIS. Statistics from the CADIS website are periodically mined using Google Analytics. The number of visits to the CADIS website has slowly grown over the last 9 months to a total of 2200+, with an average of more than 150 visits a week and a maximum of more than 35 visits per day. Most users reach the CADIS site using a search engine or are referred through another site.