Data central's data aggregation service
B. Miszalski, Simon J. O'Toole, James Tocknell, Lachlan James Marnoch, S. D. Ryder · 2022
Astronomers routinely have to collate heterogeneous observational data for one or several targets from a variety of online resources. Traditionally this process of data aggregation can be time consuming and error prone, especially if multiple telescope archives or data centres are searched individually. To streamline this task we have developed Data Central’s Data Aggregation Service (DAS), an interactive web application that leverages Aladin Lite to display images and catalogues resulting from multiple online service queries of a given target. The modern asynchronous Python design allows these queries to be sent simultaneously and individual results are quickly displayed as soon as they are received. The DAS also hosts Pipeline As a Web Service (PAWS) data reduction workflows that may be triggered on demand. The DAS can effectively unlock science from unreduced data in telescope archives and may help manage the massive data volumes expected from next generation facilities.