IDIPOS: a proposal for an Italian Database Infrastructure for Polar Observation Sciences

Since a long time the Italian Antarctic Program (PNRA) supports and funds scientific and technological activities addressed to the realization, the upgrade and the maintenance of the infrastructure and instruments used to monitor the Sun-Earth system in the polar regions. This paper describes the IDIPOS project, a proposal recently submitted to PNRA addressed to design and realize an hardware and software infrastructure to create databases of digital acquisition coming from past and present experimental observations in the polar regions. In case of approval this technological infrastructure will be realized in Italy and will allow an integration with the telematic infrastructures that already exist or of future development in the Italian polar stations. This will constitute a necessary tool for all those research projects relying on a fast access and dissemination of the data. In a first stage the observations included in the project will be related to several Research Project included in the following PNRA sectors: "Geodesy and Observatories", "Glaciology", "Physics and Chemistry of Atmosphere" and "Sun-Earth Relations and Astrophysics". Once realized, the infrastructure will be potentially extensible to other observational activities.