A Prototype Scientific Resource Access System for Living With a Star Scientists

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scientific resources, including data repositories and analysis tools, available to solar and space physicists for research use. As the Living With a Star satellites begin to collect data and as more analysis tools are created, the data and analysis environment will become increasingly complex. Currently, scientists visit multiple sites and use general-purpose search engines to locate and retrieve data and analysis tools. While this approach currently works within a discipline, as the quantity of data and tools increase, this method of search and retrieval will become increasingly inadequate for both inter-disciplinary and intra-disciplinary research. Data and tool providers may also find it difficult to identify and supply their resources, particularly when supporting multiple scientific disciplines, data formats, and resource sites. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, we are developing a prototype Scientific Resource Access System (SRAS) to allow scientists to discover and access multiple distributed scientific resources from a single interface. In addition, it enables resource providers to identify and make available their resources with a minimum of effort, without having to convert or upload the data. The SRAS will provide a simple and complete method to allow the space science community to gather and share valuable data and analysis tools.