DaCHS, SODA, and Datalink

DaCHS, the Data Center Helper Suite, is a comprehensive suite for publishing astronomical data to the Virtual Observatory, supporting most major protocols out there. On Dec 12, GAVO released a new version, 0.9.8. The most notable change is that now SODA is supported as specified in the last IVOA Proposed Recommendation.

This is fairly big news, as SODA is the VO's answer to providing cutout services and the like, which obviously is important part with datasets in the Multi-Gigabyte range and the VO's wider programme of trying to enable users to only download what they need. But even for spectra, which aren't typically terribly large, we have been using SODA; for instance, when you just want to see the development of a single line over time, say,, it's nice to not have to bother with the the full spectrum. The spectral client SPLAT has been offering such functionality for a couple of years now -- watch out for the scissors icon in discovery results. These indicate SODA support on the respective services.

Another client that will support SODA and its basis Datalink is Aladin – we've seen a promising demo of that during the last Interop in Trieste. Until the clients are there, DaCHS contains a (largely re-usable) stylesheet that generates simple UIs for Datalink documents and SODA services. Some examples:

• Cutout over a califa cube (including links to previous versions)
• Cutout over a plate scan (including a links to a photo of the cover page and a grey wedge)
• Various retrieval options for a spectrum (which also links split-order versions of the echelle spectrum)

Note again that all of these are not actually web pages, they're machine-readable metadata collections; if you don't believe it, pull the URLs with curl. To learn more about the combo of Datalink and SODA, check out this ADASS 2015 poster (preferably before even looking at the not terribly readable standards texts).

If you're running DaCHS yourself and can't wait to run Datalink and SODA -- here's how to do that.