GEMVO

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http://virbo.org/GEMVO


Virtual Observatory Tools Tutorial Session


GEM 2012 Meeting, Snowmass, Colorado, June 20th, 2012

Contents

  1. Agenda
  2. Session Objectives
  3. Overview of Virtual Observatories
    1. General
    2. NASA
  4. ViRBO
    1. Overview
    2. Autoplot
    3. Use cases
    4. New features
    5. Live Demo
    6. Activity Suggestions
    7. VMO
    8. VMR
    9. SuperMAG
    10. Working Session

1. Agenda

2. Session Objectives

  • Introduce new science analysis tools (~30 minutes)
  • Working session on tools (remainder)
  • There are many people in this session that can answer questions. Experiment with the tools and ask questions.

3. Overview of Virtual Observatories

3.1. General

  • Definitions vary.
  • Simply stated, they address many of the "big data" problems encountered in science.

Concept originated in Astronomy [1]:

A Virtual observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools which utilize the internet to form a scientific research environment in which astronomical research programs can be conducted. In much the same way as a real observatory consists of telescopes, each with a collection of unique astronomical instruments, the VO consists of a collection of data centres each with unique collections of astronomical data, software systems and processing capabilities. The main goal is to allow transparent and distributed access to data available worldwide. This allows scientists to discover, access, analyze, and combine nature and lab data from heterogeneous data collections in a user-friendly manner.

3.2. NASA

NASA has its own vision for a Heliophysics VO framework: A Heliophysics Data Environment (HDPE) VxO (where x = heliophysics domain, e.g., radiation belt) [2] is the space scientists' analog to the Astronomical VO concept [3]:

... a suite of software applications on a set of computers that allows users to uniformly find, access, and use resources (data, software, document, and image products and services using these) from a collection of distributed product and service providers. A VO includes registries based on a metadata model, front-end applications, and connections to data providers.

A list of Space Physics VO resources that I am aware of: http://virbo.org/Resources/VO

4. ViRBO

4.1. Overview

  • A domain-specific virtual observatory for radiation belt science
  • Initiated at LASP by D. Baker, J. Green, and R. Weigel in 2006. Now run out of GMU.
  • A few activities
    1. Lots of previous inaccessible data now online
    2. Hosting RB-related meeting agenda, presentations, and challenge campaign data: http://virbo.org/Resources/Science
    3. Development of metadata for enabling data services [4]
    4. Development of visualization tools for data, e.g., Autoplot (mature development), ViViz (under development)
    5. Development of a common interface for data access TSDS (under development)

4.2. Autoplot

4.3. Use cases

Where does Autoplot fit in the visualization tool continuum?

  • Three general use-cases for science visualiazation.
  • No single application can be used for all. (Although some overlap.)
  • There is a need for all three types.
Three general use-cases for geospace science visualizations
Use case Primary Interface GUI type Analysis Capabilities Examples
Quick overview and browse web browser simple little iSWA, ART, quicklooks, gifwalks, ViViz
Comprehensive visualization not web browser sophisticated some MIDL, Autoplot
Output from analysis command line/script minimal any TDAS, PaPCo

4.4. New features

This release introduces three types of bookmarks:

  1. Raw
    • Selecting a raw bookmark will result in an attempt at an automatic single-panel display of data associated with the bookmark's URL.
    • Some GUI interaction may be required for some bookmarks.
    • ~80% of the CDAWeb Raw Bookmarks should "just work".
  2. Special Views
    • Stylized plots using data from many data providers. For examples, see the ViRBO sub-folder.
    • Growing list of Special Views: http://virbo.org/gallery
    • To interact with data, Start Autoplot and select Bookmarks->Heliophysics->ViRBO (bookmarks take ~5 seconds to load).
    • Special Views are generally created by scientists using the Expert GUI mode and Raw Bookmarks and then contributed to ViRBO's Special Views repository.
  3. Overviews
    • A data set for which the initial view is of the full time range of available data. Draw a box on a time range to zoom in on a specific time interval.
    • Overviews are available in Autoplot under the ViRBO bookmarks folder.
    • Overviews will eventually be available from a web browser (demo page: [5]).

4.5. Live Demo

4.6. Activity Suggestions

  • Basic: Install Autoplot and browse the bookmarks. (Should install and launch automatically. See [6] if something goes wrong)
  • Advanced: Try to crack open a data file on the web and inspect its contents. Examples:
    • ftp://virbo.org/POES/n19/2012/poes_n19_20120101.cdf.zip
    • http://goes.ngdc.noaa.gov/data/avg
    • http://geomag.usgs.gov/data/indices/Dst_minute/
  • Try to create a special view of data from multiple locations using raw bookmarks. See http://autoplot.org/help#Adding_Plots and http://autoplot.org/cookbook for documentation.

4.7. VMO

Virtual Magnetosphere Observatory (Jan Merka)

4.8. VMR

Virtual Model Repository (Jan De Zeeuw)

4.9. SuperMAG

SuperMAG (Shin Ohtani)

4.10. Working Session

Working session on tools (~ 60 minutes)

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