Development and Usage of the SPASE Schema for documenting Heliophysics Data Products

Abstract:

The Space Physics Archive Search and Extract, SPASE, data model is an XML schema that has been developed in order to describe data product resources that are relevant to the study of the Sun as well as the Sun’s influence on the solar wind, the Earth, and the near-Earth environment. In NASA parlance, this branch of space physics is called heliophysics. SPASE has been used to describe data products from a vast set of sources including observations collected by spacecraft and ground-based observatories and data from complementary data generated by numerical simulations, empirical models, and other sources. SPASE has been utilized widely by groups such as the SPASE Metadata Working Team, SMWT, which is closely affiliated with NASA, as well as other agencies in Australia, Europe, Japan, and Vietnam. In fact, the COSPAR Panel on Space Weather (PSW) has resolved that SPASE be adopted as the metadata standard to describe space physics and space weather data and encourages funding agencies around to world to support the usage of SPASE to describe heliophysics data. The SPASE schema remains under development to ensure that the model can capture the information required to allow uniform and persistent community access to and final archiving of these data products. The SPASE metadata registries compiled and maintained by the SMWT now include some 14,000 descriptions of resources including pertinent directly to data (numerical, display, catalog), origination (observatory, instrument, person, document), and infrastructure (registry, repository, service). The SPASE schema now includes several hundred text elements as well as about 50 different enumeration lists compiled to meet its intended purpose. Given that copious SPASE metadata descriptions now exist, one can ask how SPASE is being leveraged to document heliophysics data products. The registered SPASE metadata can thus be used as data in its own right to study utilization of the data model and to guide its future evolution.