Integrated Digital East Antarctica: consolidating a software toolkit for data-driven Antarctic Science
Michael Sumner1, Aleks Terauds2, Ben Raymond3 1Australian Antarctic Division, Hobart, TAS, Australia2Aleks Terauds, Hobart, TAS, Australia3Ben Raymond, Hobart, TAS, Australia
Abstract
Background
Integrated Digital East Antarctica (IDEA) is a digital platform to facilitate interdisciplinary Antarctic and Southern Ocean data and data products. IDEA will be impact-driven, addressing the specific needs of a diverse range of end users and partners from across the science and policy landscapes.
Importantly, IDEA will be collaborative, and will bring together a broad suite of partners to complement and build on existing capability and resources. It will provide seamless access to multiple and integrated sources of data and data products, ranging across disciplines and biomes. It will underpin high impact science and inform decision making.
Actions
We maintain a large collection of data sources that includes global and polar environmental, remote sensing, climate and ocean/atmosphere/ice models and over years have built up tools that encode knowledge about those data sources inside software. We now aim to separate these metadata from code implementations, to drive our migration from legacy spatial technologies to a set of cross-language geospatial tools using current best software.
Results
This bridges our current tooling to IDEA, keeping our existing tools working, and creating a resource of re-useable metadata and knowledge about a wide-ranging data library.
Conclusion
We present the major steps taken in this software refactor, to recast older techniques for files and online data sources to modern practices, contributing to shared software libraries and creating catalogues in readily accessible modern formats, and identify key areas opportunities for collaboration for a range of end users and partners.
Biography
Michael Sumer (he/him) is a software engineer and geospatial data expert at the Australian Antarctic Division. Working on the Integrated Digital East Antarctica program he is working consolidating a decade’s worth of grass-roots software toolkit development into a foundation for future data driven Antarctic science. Michael is also an enthusiastic educator of R and package creator, learning C++ and Python to diversify and extend Southern Ocean data handling, and is a passionate advocate for map projections and data structures.