Information Without Borders: The Challenge of Connecting Disparate Data and Information Resources (Invited Presentation)

The Arctic Institute of North America (AINA) is a multidisciplinary research and educational organization with a mandate to advance the study of the North American and circumpolar Arctic through the natural and social sciences, the arts and humanities and to acquire, preserve and disseminate information on physical, environmental and social conditions in the North. As part of this mandate, AINA operates a public online database, the Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS) (www.aina.ucalgary.ca/astis) and the network-enabled geospatial information platform ArcticConnect (www.arcticconnect.org). Shannon Christoffersen Vossepoel, AINA’s Manager, Data and Information Services, discusses the difficulties of working with different types of data, managing cross-disciplinary resources, and the development of the Canadian Consortium for Arctic Data Interoperability (CCADI) which is attempting to meet the challenge of digitally linking Canada’s various Polar databases and their diverse collection of resources.