Facilities and Instruments Description framework

Describing Facilities, Telescopes and Instruments

This is a common effort initiated in the Semantics working group, namely with suggestions from Planetary science services at Paris Obseervatory and collaborators.

The idea is to identify and gather needs for a homogeneized description and identification of instruments, telescopes, space missions, space crafts, etc. and create a maintained repository of identifiers re-usable by the community for

- keywords verifications in data sets serialisation

- data citation

- facilicity citations tracing

etc...

Context: "science questions drive the need for multi-lambda, multi-messenger observations" (Mark Allen, HCERES). Discoverability of observations would be improved.

Existing Initiatives

ExistingInit

UseCases

Use Cases for Facilities description

Discussion for a description schema

from the usage exposed , we see the facilities and instruments need to be standardized (name , ids ) together with physical features such as spectral range, operational period, field of view, spatial resolution, mode, etc.

Nominal feature values for instruments can be used in various services, when the information attached to a dataset ( associated data , catalog , etc) is not available).

Use cases exposed above may have 3 levels of usage for instruments/ telecope parameters:

• precise : theses are the exact parameters for a specific observation
• intermediate: the usual values ex spectral coverage , recorded for a data collection ( ex 2MASS J --> fits the range of filter J.
  This applies when fluxes have been converted to a different photometric system than the original instrumental one
• global : when no other info is provided for the spectral range of a data set, the min and max spectral range of the instrument can be used.