SIOS Data Management System

SIOS offers a virtual data centre for unified access to relevant data describing Earth System Science in Svalbard. The SIOS Data Management System (SDMS) relies on the principles of distributed data management. Datasets, as well as their associated metadata, are managed by several physically distributed Data Centres. Each Data Centre has its own set of Data Management Facilities for ingestion of new data (and associated metadata), maintenance of the data sets (including metadata) and for data curation. The SIOS Data Management Service enables data submission, discovery, access, use and preservation of SIOS relevant data sets and metadata across these data centres.

Main objectives of the data management system

• Integrate the information managed by contributing data centres in a unified catalogue through metadata harvesting.
• Provide human and machine interfaces to the catalogue and data.
• Ensure that all datasets generated through the use of SIOS facilities are delivered to a data repository that is connected to the SIOS data management system and thus made available to the SIOS user community.
• Develop a strategy that facilitates and promotes the utilisation of these data in research and other user communities.

More specifically the service focuses in prioritised order on:

1. Data discovery -  finding relevant datasets across the distributed data repositories contributing to the SIOS Data Management System.
2. Retrieval of data - downloading data identified in the previous step.
3. Visualisation of data - generating a graphical interpretation of a dataset (either as a map, a time series or appropriate).
4. Transformation of data - reformatting, reprojecting, subsetting and combining different datasets into a new dataset.