DataShop - A New Tool for Multi-Data Source Analysis

Simultaneous analysis of numerous, diverse data sources--solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric, ITM, and ground-based--is essential to the use of STEREO data to fill in a complete picture of Sun-Earth interactions. We present progress in the development of DataShop, a tool to enable and simplify analysis of multiple data sources. DataShop will be able to read and plot energetic particle data, magnetic field data, plasma data, and electric field data, as well as spacecraft ephemeris data. Similar to the way popular image analysis tools can open and manipulate any of the common image formats, DataShop will be able to read data in any of the common formats used within the heliospheric community: HDF4, HDF5, CDF, netCDF, FITS, and ASCII. Finally DataShop will be designed in such a way that it can be hooked into the emerging Virtual Observatories being created for the heliospheric community (such as the VHO and the VSPO). Since most first generation VO's provide primarily a file finding service, DataShop will enable users to browse and analyze the multiplicity of files returned to them from a VO query.