Autoplot: A browser for scientific data on the web

TL;DR

Autoplot is a flexible, extensible web-based tool designed for automated scientific data visualization, originally for heliophysics but adaptable to other Earth science data formats and applications.

Contribution

It introduces a generic internal data model, QDataSet, enabling flexible, automated plotting across diverse data formats and expanding its utility beyond heliophysics.

Findings

Proven flexibility in exploring and visualizing web-stored data

Extensible architecture for creating specialized data analysis tools

Potential applicability to Earth sciences beyond heliophysics

Abstract

Autoplot is software developed for the Virtual Observatories in Heliophysics to provide intelligent and automated plotting capabilities for many typical data products that are stored in a variety of file formats or databases. Autoplot has proven to be a flexible tool for exploring, accessing, and viewing data resources as typically found on the web, usually in the form of a directory containing data files with multiple parameters contained in each file. Data from a data source is abstracted into a common internal data model called QDataSet. Autoplot is built from individually useful components, and can be extended and reused to create specialized data handling and analysis applications and is being used in a variety of science visualization and analysis applications. Although originally developed for viewing heliophysics-related time series and spectrograms, its flexible and generic data representation model makes it potentially useful for the Earth sciences.