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Curator: Responsible Official: Last Revised: Friday, 09-May-2003 [NLJ] |
Toward a Space Physics Data Dictionary
By Ed Bell, Code 633
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several years an international consortium of scientists and software
engineers from several different archives have been regularly meeting
to discuss interoperability issues between space physics archives.
A goal of this consortium has been to determine a method of querying,
via a web interface, the disparate systems at these centers so as
to produce a listing of available data, regardless of location, from
which a researcher can then determine the data of interest and retrieve
it. The name of this effort is SPASE (Space Physics Archive Search
and Exchange). A necessary requirement of such a system is a common
terminology, an interlingua, that would allow such queries across
systems to speak the same language. This space physics data dictionary
could be used not only as a means of exchanging data and information
between archives, but could be used to uniformly search for and retrieve
data for scientific analysis.
On 19 -20 March 2003 a workshop was hosted by the NSSDC at Goddard Space Flight Center to discuss this data dictionary among a wider community. From this workshop were identified approximately twelve terms that would be useful in searching for space and/or solar physics data and a number of additional terms that would further discriminate between potentially useful data sets. Tentative definitions were outlined and further refined after the meeting by Todd King of the PDS Planetary Plasma Interactions (PPI) node at UCLA with input by other participants of the consortium. A subsequent meeting was held at the joint AGU/EGU/EGS meeting in France on 10 April 2003. At a splinter group session, the initial draft data dictionary was presented to attendees and their input and participation on subsequent drafts solicited. Finally, a follow-up meeting was conducted in Toulouse, France on 14 April 2003 between selected participants of the SPASE consortium to determine what work was still required and how best to involve the world space physics community. The accompanying table shows the terms deemed useful by the various participants with those in bold face being the ones deemed most useful for query purposes. Draft definitions for these terms are still in flux, but are expected to be completed during the summer. Other parts of the data dictionary, those used primarily to characterize the data holdings, are expected by the Fall. It is anticipated that the resulting document will become a standard for archives of space physics data, enabling scientists to more easily locate, access, and use available data. If you are interested in participating in this effort, you are encouraged to do so. For additional information or to volunteer your services, contact Dr. Jim Thieman (james.r.thieman@nasa.gov), Dr. Ed Bell (ed.bell@gsfc.nasa.gov), or Dr. Chris Harvey (harvey@cnes.fr). |
SPASE Data Dictionary ElementsThe
elements of the data dictionary have been divided into two categories:
those deemed most useful for initial queries for space Primary (Query) ElementsProject
Observatory
Experiment
Type Instrument
Name Instrument
Spatial Region Instrument
Position Observed
Spatial Region Observed
Spatial Extent Observed
Time Span Physical
Entity Physical
Parameter Product
Processing Level
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