A Network of Text, Data and People for the Earth System Sciences

Earth System Science is an outstanding example of a field of research which yields important results especially when conducted in multidisciplinary and global cooperation. The International Polar Year and its expected legacy are used as an example to illustrate this assertion and the financial and intellectual expense invested. It follows that any effort to make more out of the globally distributed – if not fragmented – results and to network the knowledge gained would be valuable indeed. An experimental implementation of such a system, connecting journal articles to datasets, expeditions and researchers involved, is introduced. Some developments necessary to implement comparable and more powerful systems on a global scale are discussed