Abstract
The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) participates in global radio astronomy and fundamental astronomy (space geodesy) research activities. Data and data products produced by HartRAO’s expanding range of on-site and off-site instrumentation must be archived and stored at HartRAO and made accessible to the scientific community. The data management and storage systems currently being used for managing fundamental astronomy data are not capable of handling the large volumes of data and have become obsolete. This necessitated the design and implementation of a next-generation Geodetic Research Data Management System (GRDMS), which complies with internationally accepted data service standards. We present the top-level conceptual model of the GRDMS and progress to date with developments of various sub-systems, data structuring and organisation within the sub-systems.
Highlights
The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) participates in radio astronomy and fundamental astronomy research activities
A Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) system and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Global Observing System (VGOS) radio telescope will become operational at HartRAO
The current system has many drawbacks - it is outdated, segmented and distributed; it has limited functionality and capacity to handle different data types and different user requirements; different approaches are followed for handling datasets; data are stored on different servers; access to the data holdings are via ftp or http, which have many broken links and are not frequently updated
Summary
The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) participates in radio astronomy and fundamental astronomy (space geodesy) research activities. The current system has many drawbacks - it is outdated, segmented and distributed; it has limited functionality and capacity to handle different data types and different user requirements; different approaches are followed for handling datasets; data are stored on different servers; access to the data holdings are via ftp or http, which have many broken links and are not frequently updated. This necessitated the design and implementation of a next-generation Geodetic Research Data Management System (GRDMS) that will be able to cater for all of HartRAO’s fundamental astronomy data, whilst complying with internationally accepted data service standards
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