The Simple Image Access protocol (SIA) provides capabilities for the discovery, description, access, and retrieval of multi-dimensional image datasets, including 2-D images as well as datacubes of three or more dimensions. SIA data discovery is based
on the ObsCore Data Model (ObsCoreDM), which primarily describes data products by the physical axes (spatial, spectral, time, and polarization). Image datasets with dimension greater than 2 are often referred to as datacubes, cube or image cube datasets and may be considered examples of hypercube or n-cube data. In this document the term image refers to general multi-dimensional datasets and is synonymous with these other terms unless the image dimensionality is otherwise specified. SIA provides capabilities for image discovery and access. Data discovery and metadata access (using ObsCoreDM) are defined here. The capabilities for drilling down to data files (and related resources) and services for remote access are defined elsewhere, but SIA also allows for direct access to retrieval.
We present a data model describing the structure of spectrophotometric datasets with spectral and temporal coordinates and associated metadata. This data model may be used to represent spectra, time series data, segments of SED (Spectral Energy Distr
ibutions) and other spectral or temporal associations.
The Simple Spectral Access (SSA) Protocol (SSAP) defines a uniform interface to remotely discover and access one dimensional spectra. SSA is a member of an integrated family of data access interfaces altogether comprising the Data Access Layer (DAL)
of the IVOA. SSA is based on a more general data model capable of describing most tabular spectrophotometric data, including time series and spectral energy distributions (SEDs) as well as 1-D spectra; however the scope of the SSA interface as specified in this document is limited to simple 1-D spectra, including simple aggregations of 1-D spectra. The form of the SSA interface is simple: clients first query the global resource registry to find services of interest and then issue a data discovery query to selected services to determine what relevant data is available from each service; the candidate datasets available are described uniformly in a VOTable format document which is returned in response to the query. Finally, the client may retrieve selected datasets for analysis. Spectrum datasets returned by an SSA spectrum service may be either precomputed, archival datasets, or they may be virtual data which is computed on the fly to respond to a client request. Spectrum datasets may conform to a standard data model defined by SSA, or may be native spectra with custom project-defined content. Spectra may be returned in any of a number of standard data formats. Spectral data is generally stored externally to the VO in a format specific to each spectral data collection; currently there is no standard way to represent astronomical spectra, and virtually every project does it differently. Hence spectra may be actively mediated to the standard SSA-defined data model at access time by the service, so that client analysis programs do not have to be familiar with the idiosyncratic details of each data collection to be accessed.
This document describes a FITS convention developed by the IRAF Group (D. Tody, R. Seaman, and N. Zarate) at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO). This convention is implemented by the fgread/fgwrite tasks in the IRAF fitsutil package
. It was first used in May 1999 to encapsulate preview PNG-format graphics files into FITS files in the NOAO High Performance Pipeline System. A FITS extension of type FOREIGN provides a mechanism for storing an arbitrary file or tree of files in FITS, allowing it to be restored to disk at a later time.
