The Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) System for Space Physics Data

The Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) system is a collaborative development effort among multi-institution, international, space physics data holding organizations intended to provide a common ground for science users to find space physics data of interest, intercompare the data, and retrieve selected data sets or portions of data sets. SPASE has developed a data model that serves as a bridge among the many space physics data archives that have data stored in multiple formats and offer access via multiple search methodologies. Our goal is to create a framework that will allow searches to be done across multiple data centers through a single mechanism. Development of an intermediate level of software will translate queries into the search mechanisms specific to each of the data centers. The results of the search are then to be put into a common format for presentation of the search results. Metadata entry tools are planned to ease the translation of the metadata to be found at the archive locations to the common metadata format needed for SPASE searching. Recent meetings among the data archive representatives and the progress of the space physics virtual observatories toward a unified space physics data environment will be discussed.