This document aims to utilize schema.org for the Polar data management community. The community has agreed on and plans on implementing uniform best practices for documenting data, observing assets, and other entities. Extensive work has been conducted under both the Earth Science Information Partnership Science-on-schema.org group and the Research Data Alliance to develop approaches and guidelines for interoperable metadata practices. While the current Science-on-schema.org guidelines provide a strong technical basis for harmonised use of the schema.org vocabulary, they do not make specific requirements for minimal acceptable metadata nor for specific types of metadata requirements for key polar research use cases. This document assembles data discovery use cases and requirements for polar data discovery that represent a target set of features for the POLDER federated search system. Use cases specifically elucidate and prioritise the functional uses of the federated data discovery platform, which will in turn be used to articulate a specific list of metadata requirements needed to implement a discovery system that provides those features.

This document was a collaboration of international organizations working in the POLDER working group (https://polder.info/). The majority of writing sessions to complete this task was completed at the bimonthly Polar to Global Hackathon Sessions, meeting notes and recording can be found at https://p2g-data.org/workshops