Jan Merka

Using semantics to extend the space physics data environment

The space physics data environment is evolving with the advent of virtual observatories. With the primary function of most virtual observatories being data search and retrieval, an emphasis has been placed on providing value-added data processing services. That is, creating web services that take discovered data and provide common and routine processing such as coordinate transformations and data sub-setting. As these services proliferate, finding, accessing and using them no longer becomes a trivial task. This paper discusses a semantic registry that enables the searching of these services via ontology. We discuss the benefits of such a registry and illustrate how the web and application programming interfaces benefit the space physics community.

Autoplot: a browser for scientific data on the web

Autoplot is software developed for the Virtual Observatories in Heliophysics to provide intelligent and automated plotting capabilities for many typical data products that are stored in a variety of file formats or databases. Autoplot has proven to be a flexible tool for exploring, accessing, and viewing data resources as typically found on the web, usually in the form of a directory containing data files with multiple parameters contained in each file. Data from a data source is abstracted into a common internal data model called QDataSet. Autoplot is built from individually useful components, and can be extended and reused to create specialized data handling and analysis applications and is being used in a variety of science visualization and analysis applications. Although originally developed for viewing heliophysics-related time series and spectrograms, its flexible and generic data representation model makes it potentially useful for the Earth sciences.