The ESA Gaia Archive: Data Release 1

TL;DR

The Gaia Archive Data Release 1 provides an advanced, integrated platform with data mining and crossmatching tools, enabling efficient access and analysis of the Gaia astronomical catalog for the scientific community.

Contribution

This paper introduces a novel data archive architecture with integrated data mining and cloud capabilities tailored for large astronomical datasets like Gaia DR1.

Findings

Implementation of TAP+ interface and crossmatch capabilities

Enabling data mining functionalities close to the data

Supporting large-scale astronomical data analysis

Abstract

ESA Gaia mission is producing the more accurate source catalogue in astronomy up to now. That represents a challenge on the archiving area to make accessible this information to the astronomers in an efficient way. Also, new astronomical missions have reinforced the change on the development of archives. Archives, as simple applications to access the data are being evolving into complex data center structures where computing power services are available for users and data mining tools are integrated into the server side. In the case of astronomy science that involves the use of big catalogues, as in Gaia (or Euclid to come), the common ways to work on the data need to be changed to a new paradigm "move code close to the data", what implies that data mining functionalities are becoming a must to allow the science exploitation. To enable these capabilities, a TAP+ interface, crossmatch capabilities, full catalogue histograms, serialisation of intermediate results in cloud resources like VOSpace, etc have been implemented for the Gaia DR1, to enable the exploitation of these science resources by the community without the bottlenecks on the connection bandwidth. We present the architecture, infrastructure and tools already available in the Gaia Archive Data Release 1 (http://archives.esac.esa.int/gaia/) and we describe capabilities and infrastructure.