Polar Environment Data Science Center

Exploring the Polar Environment through AI and Data Science

The purpose of the Polar Environment Data Science Center (PEDSC) is to promote the publishing and sharing of the diverse scientific data obtained through observation and research activities in the Antarctic and Arctic regions, so as to generate further scientific outputs, and to strengthen collaboration with universities and other external communities — including support, from a data-science perspective, that makes use of AI. Internationally, PEDSC is also expected to play the role of a national data center for polar science in Japan. Its goals are to play a central role in the data activities of polar science research in Japan, to create a new, data-centric polar science, and to contribute to the advancement of global environmental studies.

Our Data Resources

PEDSC handles data covering every field of polar science. In both polar regions, observation and research activities are conducted across a wide range of fields — including upper atmospheric sciences, meteorology, marine science, glaciology, geoscience, and bioscience — yielding an enormous variety of data, from digital data recorded on various media to physical sample data that has been collected and preserved.
After acquisition, this data undergoes various forms of processing, analysis, and interpretation before it becomes physically meaningful data from which scientific results can be generated. To produce reliable scientific results, the reliability of the data must be ensured — that is, it must be securely stored and not lost, degraded, or tampered with, and it must remain available to anyone, so that the same scientific results can be reproduced.

Our Activities

At the same time, research into phenomena such as global environmental change can sometimes generate entirely new results by using diverse data from multiple fields simultaneously.
In such cases, it becomes necessary to handle location information, attribute information, and other meta-information (metadata) about the data in a unified way. It is also the case that data from one field can be applied to an entirely unforeseen field, generating unexpected new results and value.
For this to happen, the publication of the data and the ease of locating it become critically important. PEDSC provides support — making full use of AI and data science — for the processing, analysis, storage, sharing, disclosure, and joint use of polar science data.