14–18 Oct 2013
Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

A modern web based data catalog for data access and analysis

14 Oct 2013, 17:47
22m
Keurzaal (Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage)

Keurzaal

Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage

Oral presentation to parallel session Distributed Processing and Data Handling B: Experiment Data Processing, Data Handling and Computing Models Distributed Processing and Data Handling B: Experiment Data Processing, Data Handling and Computing Models

Speaker

Brian Van Klaveren (SLAC)

Description

The SLAC Computing Applications group (SCA) has developed a general purpose data catalog framework, initially for use by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, and now in use by several other experiments. The main features of the data catalog system are: * Ability to organize datasets in a virtual hierarchy without regard to physical location or access protocol * Ability to catalog datasets stored at multiple locations and with multiple versions * Ability to attach arbitrary meta-data to datasets and folders * Web based and command line interfaces for registering, viewing and searching datasets * A data "crawler" to verify catalog integrity and automate meta-data extraction * A download manager for reliable download of collections of files In this paper we will describe a recent project to update the data catalog to current web standards, in particular to: * Isolate the database back-end from the server-side middle-ware by use of a file abstraction layer * Develop Restful interfaces to make the server side functionality accessible to many tools and languages * Develop a modern HTML5 based web client which also communicates with the server using Restful interfaces, and provides dynamic functionality such as drag and drop file upload/download. These improvement open the way to integrating components of the data catalog with different back-end systems, and to provide a portal to support not only access to data, but to be able to operate on and analyze data remotely.

Primary authors

Presentation materials