Giulio Verazzo and Chiara Ripa

The National Antarctic Data Center (NADC) is the ICT infrastructure designed to gather, handle, publish and provide access to the wide amount of scientific data and metadata collected by the large research activity promoted and supported by the Italian Antarctic National Research Program (PNRA). This integrated system is organized in functional/first level nodes interconnected together with each other by means of mediation and adaptation services running on a central infrastructure (common node). International standard interfaces and metadata models, widely supported by scientific communities, were used in order to provide the best interoperability within/inside the system. This infrastructure adopts and promotes Open Science (European Commission, 2016) according to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable (FAIR) guiding principles, providing easy access to data and resources and favouring their sharing. The open source software GeoNetwork was chosen as the system for the NADC purpose. It allows the management of metadata of scientific projects concerning biology, climatology, radiation and environment that characterize the activities carried out by Italian organisations/entities in Antarctica. Metadata records are defined by the ISO19115-3 standard format and validated against the INSPIRE rules. The hierarchical structure of the metadata format allows to trace the information related to the projects in which the datasets have been collected and to correlate the various initiatives with each other. With a similar approach an infrastructure to catalogue and manage the Arctic data (IADC -Italian arctic data centre) is under development in the framework of the the Italian Arctic Research Programme (PRA), also intending to realize a repository for all activities performed in the Arctic by Italian Research groups, mainly those with a long-term observation character. Detail on the status of both infrastructures, technical choices, perspectives and future plan will be provide.