The Helioviewer Project: making petabytes of images available to everyone

The Helioviewer Project makes it simple to create and share multi-instrument images and movies of solar phenomena with a few clicks of a mouse. Around 1,000 movies per day are created by both scientists and members of the public using Helioviewer Project client applications. This presentation will discuss the underlying organization and technology of the Helioviewer Project that makes it easy for users anywhere to browse, visualize and share the very latest solar image data from multiple spacecraft at arbitrary time-scales and length-scales. In particular, the presentation will discuss the adoption and use of the JPEG 2000 image format, which is used to store a high-quality wavelet-compressed version of the original science image data and a full copy of the science meta-data. The JPEG 2000 standard also includes the JPEG 2000 Internet Protocol (JPIP), which makes it possible to efficiently stream images and dynamically assembled movies over the web by sending only the wavelet coefficients required to show the desired portion of the movie. We will also discuss how the visualization services we provide are being integrated with the data provision services of the Virtual Solar Observatory and the solar phenomena catalog services of the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase, to create more scientifically useful and integrated data search, browse and acquisition tools. We will also discuss how the barrier to providing images to the Helioviewer Project is being lowered so that as many different scientifically useful solar image data-sets can be made available as simply as possible. Finally, we will discuss some of the lessons learned in setting up the services we provide and our experience in attracting and keeping users.