Archiving data from a software telescope

Abstract

The landscape of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy is drastically changing with the perspective of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). For the first time in this energy domain, CTA will be operated as an observatory open to the astronomy community and produce data that will be publicly released to a large community of scientists. In the context of Cherenkov astronomy, the data processing stages imply both assumptions and comparison to dedicated simulations. As a consequence, “Provenance” information is crucial to the end user in order to interpret the high level data products and there are thus strong requirements to ensure data quality, reliability and trustworthiness. Among those requirements, traceability and reproducibility of the data products can be answered by structuring and storing the provenance information for each data product. We are partners in ASTERICS DADI and developed several pieces of software to enable the tracking of provenance information for the large-scale complex astronomical observatory CTA and a web-based data diffusion prototype, in close relation with the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).