While POLDER has been working developing best practice guidance for the data centres that provide metadata, the World Data System’s International Technology Office has spent the last six months working on the practical tools needed to implement the POLDER vision - the IT tools that support a search page for all the standardised metadata that POLDER hopes to create. The Polar Federated Search will be a customisable search website, designed to meet the needs of the international polar research community, but that can be tailored to meet different needs.

The pilot Polar Federated Search is now ready for testing, with the caveat that it is still at a relatively early stage of development. It links to a small number of metadata catalogues and includes free-text and temporal search tools, with spatial search and a much bigger set of source catalogues still to come in the next year. Please take a look and get in touch with your thoughts about what works and any improvements you would like to see. Melinda Minch (ito-webdev1[at]oceannetworks.ca) is the lead developer and she would love to hear from you.

If your institution has a metadata catalogue that you think should be included, there are two key ways to connect. Firstly, if your catalogues are already part of the DataOne index, it is already in there! Secondly, if you are able to follow the Science On Schema.Org guidelines for implementing schema.org (and, in time, the POLDER Best Practices) then all you have to do is provide a sitemap to Melinda to get linked up.

Best of all, if this sounds like it is beyond the capability of your institution’s data centre, we can add you to the list of repositories to receive one-on-one development help from us so that we can help you meet the schema.org guidelines and get your data included.