Korea Polar Data Center

The Korea Polar Data Center (KPDC) is an organization dedicated for managing different types of data acquired during scientific research that South Korea carries out in Antarctic and Arctic regions. South Korea, as an Antarctic Treaty Consultative Party (ATCP) and an accredited member of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) established the Center in 2003 as part of its effort to joint international Antarctic research. In 2010, South Korea formulated the “Master-plan for Polar Data Center of South Korea” to found its own polar data center. Since then, ongoing efforts are being made to construct the solid infrastructure for data management by enacting and implementing polar data management policies, developing and operating a meta data management system, and establishing the data management system for each research area and digital data management system. In 2012, it pushed forward to providing training courses and raising awareness, targeting researchers participating in polar studies so as to increase efficiency of data management based on the established system and infrastructure. It also established the schemes for data back up and storage for acquired digital data to be safely management and permanently stored in its own system. Furthermore, it has contributed to the international society’s polar researches by sharing the internally obtained polar data and experience with people concerned from Korea and other countries. In 2017, it reorganized the overall data sharing system to improve the accessibility and convenience for those who use the polar data, along with the efforts for advancing the related systems supported by the specialized IT consulting. The KPDC has a plan to develop and operate the Portal Service for Polar Data to provide comprehensive and various polar information and data so that researchers can have easy access to polar data by efficient management and distribution of the data. It also aims to expand its infrastructure for safe management and storage of polar data, as well as to upgrade, on a continuous basis, the systematic tools for the comprehensive management of polar data obtained from diverse research fields of polar regions.