Polar Data Forum IV

Polar Data Forum IV was held in September 2021, hosted online (thanks to the pandemic) by the European Polar Board and the Belgian Museum of Natural Sciences, and co-convened by SOOS and other polar data organisations. The online format resulted in more than twice the number of registrations at the last PDF, held in Helsinki in 2019.

PDF IV was co-hosted with the Southern Ocean UN Decade Workshop, which allowed for cross-fertilisation of ideas, and the online format did not inhibit the hackathon sessions that have accompanied the conference proceedings of the last two PDFs. There were lively discussions on the emerging field of Virtual Research Environments, new polar technologies, federating metadata search, and how to document data flows into aggregators like SOOSmap. Progress was made on documenting best practices and refining data policies for all three polar data committees (the SOOS DMSC, the Standing Committee on Antarctic Data Management, and the Arctic Data Committee).