Helsinki hosted a wonderful Polar Data Forum. It was the third time ever and it had a new record audience at 150 participants in Forum sessions and over 30 extras in a closely related side-event. The first two days were packed with the conference having 36 presentations and 17 lightning talks. A great breadth of actions across the globe on three poles, technical for the most, but some even touching social matters. In conclusion we might say that in matters of data management remote areas of this world pay a lot of attention.
The next days two days 9 partly parallel sessions drilled practically into broad policy, detailed semantics and federated search topics. Sessions dedicated to data interoperability, Marine data, NASA Icesat2 mission and EU Polar data policy fleshed out progress and knowledge transfer in many directions. Attendance was in total about half of that of the conference, but most praise I heard afterwards came from this part.
Friday was then dedicated to business meetings of the Arctic Data Committee and the Standing Committee of Antarctic Data Management. They mixed at times to have actions well linked up. The ADC meeting sparked off a new direction for a potential new working group (currently Federated Search and Semantics): One for Analysis Ready Data from Earth Observation (=satellite data). Anyone is welcome to join, we especially hope anyone that is hosting Arctic EO data would join this group.
Thanks a bunch for everybody at Helsinki last week!