ADP Submission

The information provided on this web page is obsolete and has been superseded by the new and updated Phase 3 information now available on the ESO web posting the documentation of the policies, data standards and user manuals for the Phase 3 process including data submission.
Please go to http://www.eso.org/sci/observing/phase3.html

Introduction

The External Data Products (EDP) group at ESO has as one of its tasks the ingestion and publication of Advanced Data Products (ADPs) into the Science Archive Facility. ADPs are high-level data products, provided by the astronomical community, generally consisting of fully reduced and calibrated imaging and spectroscopic data, ancillary products, catalogues etc. which enable immediate scientific exploitation (see examples here).

Starting from P75, PIs of Large Programmes at ESO are requested to deliver to ESO final data products at the time of publication of their results. ADPs from upcoming Public Surveys with VST and VISTA will also be ingested and distributed via the Science Archive Facility. To this end, ESO is developing a web-based product submission and upload interface, which is expected to be available soon.

The benefits from a simple access to an increasing number of ADPs for data providers and the community at large are numerous:

  • Enhance the legacy value of ESO data, facilitating further scientific exploitation
  • Uniform distribution of data products through the ESO Science Archive facility (search interfaces, complex queries etc.)
  • High visibility of data products and scientific results
  • Global broadcast to VO resource registries


In order to ease future ingestion of data products from ESO Programmes, we provide here the guidelines for such a process, with an overview of the requested metadata information and formats, which can be taken into consideration when creating the data products. These are general guidelines for all types of images and for 1D spectra; specific guidelines for more complex data sets may appear later. For more specific queries, please contact usd-help@eso.org, subject: EDP - ADP Submission.

A detailed overview of how the final submission and upload interface will work will be given here when the interface has been completed.

For those who already want to make their ADPs publicly available through the ESO Science Archive, we have specified the current procedure hereafter.

Guidelines


In case your ADPs do not fall into these categories, please contact usd-help@eso.org, subject: EDP - ADP Submission.

Current procedure

The steps to deliver ADPs to the Science Archive Facility before the ingestion interface is available are:

  1. Collect your data products in one or more TAR files if possible; these may include fully processed and calibrated images and spectra, ancillary files (such as weight maps, variance spectra, masks, finding charts, diagrams, catalogues), and in some cases master calibration files. The main science products will have to be in FITS format, ancillary information can be in any standard graphic format (ps, pdf, jpg, etc.)
  2. Build metadata information by making sure that FITS headers contain the required information as described in the Guidelines.
  3. Provide a readme file as described in the Guidelines.
  4. Prepare a presentation file describing the scientific program and all the delivered data products, as described in the Guidelines.
  5. Contact the EDP group so that the necessary arrangements can be made. The email address is usd-help@eso.org, subject: EDP - ADP Submission.

Contact

For any questions regarding the submission of ADPs to the ESO Archive, please feel free to contact the EDP group. The email address is usd-help@eso.org, subject: EDP - ADP Submission.