Welcome

This website is the starting point for the Soteria Data Archive in development for the Soteria FP7 project.

SODA is a distributed catalog for Data. Its target is to become the equivalent of Google^® but for astrophysical data.

It shares some common characteristics with Google like:

• A web interface with and intuitive query language
• A set of distributed background servers making it always accessible.

But it has also enhanced features like:

• Supports FITS keywords (TIME-OBS,...), units and logical operators.
• Is Web service based. It uses the SOAP technology and provides an open API to access it through applications
• It is Open Source : Everybody can download the software, install it and modify it
• It is developer friendly : We provide tools for you to become part of the network and support on a best effort basis.

 

How to Access the SODA web page

It is very easy. Click on the SODA can image above. It will bring you directly to the query window

 How to use it

It is very easy.

You see a search box where you can write text. You have to write your query there.

A query is a boolean expression composed of keyword/values pairs connected by logical operators. Well, that sound complex but it is simple.

Boolean expression

A boolean expression is a formula composed of boolean operators (or, not and and parenthesis). The terms (items) are in our case are the keyword/values pairs.

For example : 

(DATE-OBS>"2001-03-01" and DATE-OBS<"2003-04-04") and (provider="ROB" or provider="UniGraz")

means "search for all the data records observerd between March 1st of 2001 and April 4 2003 and provided either by ROB or by UniGraz"

Keyword/values pairs

A keyword/value pair is composed of a keyword name followed by a relational operator(<,>,=, !=) and a keyword value delimited by double quotes.

A keyword name is most of the time the name of a keyword found into the corresponding FITS data file but it is not mandatory. A list of supported keywords names along with their type and definition is summarized on the search page.

The keyword value is the value you compare the content of the keyword name with. It is put between double quotes to allow the system to know where the value ends in case of values with multiple words or items. 

More information

More detailed information can be found in the documentation of the project 

 

Add bubbles to your work

There is possibility to access SODA directly from your own script or application. 

Under the hood, there is a software library playing the role of a client which is used by the WEB interface but can also be used by external programs.

That library has been used to integrate SODA with IDL^®.

More information can be found on the  project documentation page.

 

Make your data bubbling

The usefulness of a library depends of the amount of book people put in it.

It is the same with SODA. If you are a scientist, please give us access to your data. Become a data provider

Becoming a data provider

To become a data provider you will need the following information:

• Description of your data : the list of keywords used to describe them uniquely like date, type of data, source of data...
• Description of how you organize them : split into data sets and who is responsible for them
• Description of how to access them. Mainly the web address (URL) and how to build an unique url for each data record.

You will also need some IT resources:

• A web server on which you will run your data provider code
• A database to store the catalog of your data.

We provides a set of tools to make the work of becoming a data provider easier:

Available tools

To make your life easier, we are developing a set of tools.

We already have :

• Sample data provider with database support.
• Data provider generator : From the description of your data, it generates nearly automatically a nearly ready to use data provider.

 Data provider generator

The data provider generator is a Netbeans plugin that help you to build interactively a file describing the data provider you want to develop.

In a second stage it allows you to "compile" this file to generate a set of files ready to be compiled by Netbeans.

Once compiled, the resulting library can be directly deployed on the Application server.

Those tools are described more in detail into the project's documentation

 Under the hood

We have also documentation about the internal architecture and code of SODA.

We have also given a few talks already which are available.

We will make them available soon.