A preliminary XML-based search system for planetary data

TL;DR

This paper presents a preliminary XML-based search system for planetary data, aiming to integrate diverse sources of planetary science information to facilitate easier access and collaboration among researchers.

Contribution

It introduces an XML data model and a search system prototype developed within the Europlanet IDIS initiative for planetary data integration.

Findings

Developed an XML data model for planetary data

Created a prototype search system for integrated data access

Released source code under GPL for community participation

Abstract

Planetary sciences can benefit from several different sources of information, i.e. ground-based or near Earth-based observations, space missions and laboratory experiments. The data collected from these sources, however, are spread over a number of smaller, separate communities and stored through different facilities: this makes it difficult to integrate them. The IDIS initiative, born in the context of the Europlanet project, performed a pilot study of the viability and the issues to be overcome in order to create an integrated search system for planetary data. As part of the results of such pilot study, the IDIS Small Bodies and Dust node developed a search system based on a preliminary XML data model. Here we introduce the goals of the IDIS initiative and describe the structure and the working of this search system. The source code of the search system is released under GPL license to allow people interested in participating to the IDIS initiative both as developers and as data providers to familiarise with the search environment and to allow the creation of volunteer nodes to be integrated into the existing network.