OLAF: Reducing the Barriers to PDS Archiving
Abstract
For years, the Planetary Data System (PDS) has focused its archiving efforts on archiving mission data. A few years ago, Congress directed NASA to ensure the all publicly funded data, including that from individually funded projects, is made publicly available through PDS or another permanent archive. To aid in this task, the Small Bodies Node (SBN) has put significant effort into reducing the barriers that exist to archiving, especially for individual researchers who have a single and focused research project (ie. non-mission data). The PDS uses an archiving standard (PDS4) that greatly improves the long-term stability of a data set, allowing metadata to be searched and machine-parsed to aid future researchers to access the data. While the labels for PDS4 are machine-friendly, they are complex with extensive interconnections with PDS4 metadata, making them non-trivial to generate by hand, particularly for small projects which have a limited budget for archiving. The Asteroid and Dust Subnode of the Small Bodies Node has developed a suite of tools to easily and efficiently archive data that comply with NASA's requirements. We have made major upgrades to the On-Line Archiving Facility (OLAF) to improve the user interface, making it a clear, focused and easy to use tool. This new system provides support for CSV and fixed-width tables, simple FITS images, documents, and very soon, generic 2D binary arrays (general images). With OLAF, a researcher can create a PDS4 archive package that is ready for submission, often in only a few days or even an afternoon. https://olaf.psi.edu
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #50
- Pub Date:
- October 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018DPS....5011411P