The Antarctic Treaty calls upon participating countries to promote international cooperation in scientific investigation by exchanging, and making freely available, scientific observations and results from Antarctica. To this end, an Antarctic Data Directory System (ADDS), comprised of an Antarctic Master Directory (AMD) containing information about Antarctic scientific data generated by a network of National Antarctic Data Centres (NADCs) in each of the Antarctic Treaty nations has been formed.
The primary goal of developing and maintaining the AMD is to disseminate knowledge about Antarctic scientific programs via data descriptions (metadata). We expect that the AMD will help facilitate interdisciplinary research, encourage effective cooperation among Treaty nations, help avoid duplication of research and data collection, help facilitate new research through access to existing Antarctic scientific data, and provide a tool for decision making for Antarctic operators and scientists.
The AMD makes use of the Directory Interchange Format (DIF) metadata standard developed by the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and the Committee on Earth Observations/International Directory Network (CEOS/IDN). Scientists are working with the NADCs to write DIFs for their field data which are then modified to the AMD and searchable on a web-based interface. The AMD is being developed as a cooperating node of the GCMD to maximize its usefulness to the largest number of users.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center has been funded by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs to coordinate U.S. participation in the AMD. Status and plans of the U.S. part of this activity, and the international context will be presented