ALMA FITS header keywords: a study from the archive User perspective

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the completeness of ALMA FITS headers from the user perspective, proposing a CASA tool to enhance keyword relevance for scientific data retrieval and comparison.

Contribution

It introduces a new CASA tool to generate relevant FITS header keywords, improving data searchability and comparison in the ALMA archive.

Findings

Current FITS headers lack many useful parameters for users.

The proposed tool can generate relevant keywords for better data exploitation.

Implementation in a web interface facilitates broader accessibility.

Abstract

ALMA products are stored in the Science Archive in the form of FITS images. It is a common idea that the FITS image headers should collect in their keywords all the information that an archive User might want to search for in order to quickly select, compare, or discard datasets. With this perspective in mind, we first present a short description of the current status of the ALMA FITS archive and images. We realized that at the moment most of the parameters that could be useful for a general User are still missing in the archived data. We then provide a CASA task generating the image header keywords that we suggest to be relevant for the scientific exploitation of the ALMA archival data. The proposed tool could be also applied to several types of interferometer data and part of it is implemented in a web interface. An example of the scientific application of the keywords is also discussed.