IRIS Digital Asset (DA) for UK Cosmological Database Interface

This proposal requests 6 months FTE RSE effort to create the digital asset required to make this expanded remit a reality. This will facilitate the straightforward search and query of large datasets, aiding transfer of the relevant subsets of these large datasets to other facilities. It will also facilitate moving of computation to the data, allowing datasets that are too large to be easily transferred to be interrogated and analysed in place. The
barriers to using these large datasets will be reduced by having easy access methods such as new Jupyter interfaces coupled tightly to the backend databases and storage.

The creation of this digital asset will be divided into work packages as follows.
- Update of existing interface
- Jupyter Notebook database interface
- Sneak-peak visualisation and meta-data tagging

This database work will be generally applicable; it will enable the creation of new databases for unrelated datasets, and provide low barrier interfaces for accessing, retrieving, processing, visualising and using these data. Additionally, where database interfaces already exist at other sites (see below), and are to be integrated into this new facility, the previous work will be reused where appropriate.