The Arctic is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The region is known for its extensive natural resources such as forests, minerals, oil, gas and fish. Tourism is growing at the region as well. Therefore, private companies, governments, politicians and scientists need reliable information about the region for research, business and decision making. A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a collection of technologies, policies and institutional arrangements that facilitate the availability of spatial data and access to them. The Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure provides easy access to geospatially related Arctic data and digital maps which have been produced by both public organisations and private companies. The Arctic SDI is developed and funded by the National Mapping Agencies of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and USA.
The Arctic SDI Geoportal provides a web map viewer to the Reference Map Service and a Metadata Catalogue Service. The searchable Metadata Catalogue is one of the important components of the Arctic SDI.
Spatineo has developed an automated method to produce a catalog of services and data. This method uses harvesting of potential services and data, followed by a filtering process that identifies what is relevant to that particular SDI. Machine learning is used for the filtering process, the models leverage a combination of spatial, textual and capability information to make the relevancy assessment. Producing a catalog with these methods allows for rapid development of service and data catalogues. Improving the quality of a catalog created in this manner is a matter of adjusting selection criteria instead of applying costly manual labour without certainty of the quality of the end result. This approach has been used successfully for the Arctic SDI to replace manually maintained catalogs. The method can find services and data relevant for a particular domain very efficiently, even when the service or data is provided by organizations outside of the core participants of the SDI. This has been of particular value to the Arctic SDI, which supports varied types of research within a their domain: any data pertaining to the Arctic is relevant even when it is produced by organisations others than the SDI core members or even outside Arctic council.
Finland will start today the 11th of May the two-year term of the Chairmanship of the Arctic Council. During this term Finland wants to strengthen Arctic cooperation and the implementation of Paris Agreement on climate change and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
