CIWS DAS Software Specification Document

Abstract

The Data Access System (DAS) is part of the Customizable Instrument Workstation FrameWork software project, aimed at providing a framework, named CIWS-FW, for the storage, processing and quick-look at data acquired from space-borne and ground-based telescope observatories, to support the Assembly, Integration, Verification and Testing (AIV/AIT) activities on scientific instruments. The CIWS-FW should also facilitate the reuse of the instrument workstation software components for the subsequent Commissioning and Operations phases to be carried out either in the mission Ground Segment of space-borne experiments, or in the Observatory site of ground-based telescopes. The DAS system is a reusable software system that allows storage, retrieval and management of metadata and data acquired and processed by the instrument workstation (Level 1 data) or produced by the subsequent levels of data processing. It provides tools and application programming interfaces to: define the data model of a specific project; store the metadata and the association between data types in a relational database system; handle the persistence of binary data, ranging from small data objects to large binary data streams, and keeping consistency between metadata and corresponding data.