For the past two months, Arctic PASSION has supported the SAON Data Portal development, a metadata-driven data portal.

The background for this portal is that there has been a longstanding need for a well-coordinated and sustained Arctic Observing Network that meets scientific and societal needs, and in January 2007 the Sustained Arctic Observing Networks Initiating Group (SAON IG) was formed to develop a set of recommendations on how to achieve long-term Arctic-wide observing activities that provide free, open, and timely access to high-quality data that will realize pan-Arctic and global value-added services and provide societal benefits, and the decision to establish SAON was made by the Arctic Council in the Nuuk Declaration (2011). The SAON data inventory gives access to Arctic observational data and products which are harvested from the contributing institutions. 

Arctic PASSION is using the SAON Data Portal as the data catalogue for the project and is developing specific guidance documentation for data providers and data centres. This information will also be made available through the SAON Data portal. The SAON Data Portal is a metadata driven data portal which harvests discovery metadata daily from the contributing data centres and ingests this in the SAON Data Catalogue. Information on how to connect your data to the SAON Data Portal can be found here.