Accessing Heliophysics Timeseries Data Through a Single Interface

We present a simple interface for digital access to tabular time series data. The intended use for this interface is to provide a standard access mechanism for existing holdings of Heliophysics data from NASA missions. Furthermore, the interface is not intended to target any particular tool, but is intended as low-level infrastructure allowing any tool to use a single interface to access the digital content of all Heliophysics timeseries data. The interface addresses only data access, not data discovery. The query structure itself is very simple, taking only a few inputs: dataset name, time range, parameter list, and output format. The result of the query is a stream of data that is independent of the storage format on the server. Currently, most data centers offer some type of computer-to-computer access mechanism, but each has unique features and usage patterns (some give files in a specific format, some stream data, etc.) so that they all require different client code to extract data. A single, simple, lowest common denominator solution is clearly still needed. We present a prototype implementation of a service implementing our basic interface, and discuss similarities and differences between our interface and other similar existing data access mechanisms, including the web services at CDAWeb, OPeNDAP, the Das2Server mechanism of Autoplot, and options based on the VOTable mechanism from the astronomy community.URL: http://datashop.elasticbeanstalk.com/