The Online Archiving Facility (OLAF): Whats New and How Can It Help You?

Learning the PDS4 archiving standard can be a daunting and tedious task for anyone looking to archive their data in the Planetary Data System (PDS). In order to make archiving easier the PDS Small Bodies Node created the Online Archiving Facility (OLAF) web application. With the assistance of OLAF users are not required to learn or maintain the detailed knowledge of the PDS4 standard, instead the only knowledge a user needs is the of their own data.

OLAF offers a step-by-step user friendly interface for uploading supported data formats, documents, metadata, and more. When a user uploads their data into OLAF the web application will output properly-formatted and PDS4-compliant XML product labels for any OLAF supported data type. Once a user has completed their uploading they then can submit their data for review. Additionally OLAF includes special workflows for each of its supported data types so users never need to learn more than necessary to archive data. OLAF also ensures that all submitted data is created to be a valid standardized PDS4 bundle without needing to review all the standards documentation.

In order to continue providing a better archiving experience OLAF has been update to support more data types such as SPICE kernels. Additionally, new features such as sharing archive packages and the ability to save unfinished submissions have also been added to continue to improve user experience.

For users who may already possess more knowledge of the PDS4 standard, OLAF also has more powerful features such as the ability to include additional keywords from Discipline Dictionaries and even create a custom project dictionary