Metadata Resources

HELIO has gathered an assortment of types of metadata in order to provide a rich search environment and facilitate the identification of interesting events and the search for data. The metadata are managed by the different services and collectively can be used to address complex science use cases. The services are normally accessed through their Web Service interfaces when being orchestrated but there are also GUIs available.

Identify interesting Events and Phenomena

The Heliophysics Event Catalogue and Heliophysics Feature Catalogue are designed to help identify interesting events and phenomena and determine the times and locations of their occurrence.

Heliophysics Event Catalogue (HEC)

The HEC contains event lists gathered from many sources and communities related to phenomena in all parts of Heliophysics. We have tried to include event lists from as many different sources as possible; for some phenomena – e.g. CMEs, flares and proton events – we have included lists describing the same events created by different groups and (in some cases) observed from different vantage points.

The Event Lists page has a discussion about the lists that have been added while the HEC Audit provides the latest summary of the event lists that are available and the time ranges that they cover.

Heliophysics Feature Catalogue (HFC)

The HFC contains the descriptions of how features evolve. It is built by using image recognition techniques on data recorded from the ground and from space missions. Five lists describing features on the solar surface and two lists describing radio emission from propagating heliospheric phenomena. For two of the solar features (active regions and coronal holes) we have used two different detection techniques.

See the HFC Contents for the summary of the types of feature that have been processed and the time ranges that they cover.

Identify and Locate suitable Observations

The Instrument Capabilities Service (ICS) and Instrument Location Service (ILS) allow the user to discover whether there could be relevant observations of the phenomena available.

The pointed-instrument tables of the Unified Observing Catalogue (UOC) support this activity. Coupled with a propagation modelling capability, the metadata services allow the user to identify the onset of a phenomenon and then track it as it moves out through the Solar System.

Finally the Provider Access Table (PAT) of the Data Provider Access Service (DPAS) provides information to the system that allows it to identify where particular datasets can be found; the planetary tables of the UOC help resolve access to data in the ESA and NASA planetary archives.

 
Last updated: 4th April 2016