The World Data Centre (WDC) system was created to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programmes of the 1957–1958

International Geophysical Year The International Geophysical Year (IGY; french: Année géophysique internationale) was an international scientific project that lasted from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958. It marked the end of a long period during the Cold War when scientific ...

by the International Council of Science ( ICSU). The WDCs were funded and maintained by their host countries on behalf of the international science community. Originally established in the United States,

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

, and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

, the WDC system expanded to other countries and to new scientific disciplines. The WDC system included up to 52 Centres in 12 countries. All data held in WDCs were available for the cost of copying and sending the requested information. At the end of 2008, following the ICSU General Assembly in Maputo (Mozambique), the World Data Centres were reformed and a new ICSU

World Data System In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

(WDS) established in 2009 building on the 50-year legacy of the ICSU World Data Centre system (WDC) and the ICSU Federation of Astronomical and Geophysical data-analysis Services.

External links

ICSU International Council for Science

List of former WDCs
Open data International scientific organizations {{sci-org-stub