The Astro-WISE approach to quality control for astronomical data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive quality control system integrated into the Astro-WISE environment, enabling transparent, traceable, and accessible quality assessment throughout the astronomical data processing pipeline.

Contribution

It presents a novel, object-oriented framework with full data lineage and chaining for quality control in astronomical data processing, enhancing transparency and accessibility.

Findings

Effective quality control via command-line and web interfaces.

Successful application to data from WFI and OmegaCAM instruments.

Improved transparency and traceability in data quality assessment.

Abstract

We present a novel approach to quality control during the processing of astronomical data. Quality control in the Astro-WISE Information System is integral to all aspects of data handing and provides transparent access to quality estimators for all stages of data reduction from the raw image to the final catalog. The implementation of quality control mechanisms relies on the core features in this Astro-WISE Environment (AWE): an object-oriented framework, full data lineage, and both forward and backward chaining. Quality control information can be accessed via the command-line awe-prompt and the web-based Quality-WISE service. The quality control system is described and qualified using archive data from the 8-CCD Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument (http://www.eso.org/lasilla/instruments/wfi/) on the 2.2-m MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla and (pre-)survey data from the 32-CCD OmegaCAM instrument (http://www.astro-wise.org/~omegacam/) on the VST telescope at Paranal.