The JSOC data record

A data record is the basic "atomic unit" of a dataseries, or more precisely: The smallest unit that will be individually registered and available for export from a data series in the JSOC catalog. Most (if not all) access to the JSOC archive by both pipeline processing modules and external data export services will be in terms of data records. In other words, what we in informally call the ``JSOC catalog'' is first an foremost a data record catalog.

Datarecords are each associated with a record number within their dataseries. The record number is an ordinal index number assigned internally by the JSOC to each new record being created. It increments by one for every new record, and so maps to record creation order. The series name and record number together uniquely identifies the data record within the JSOC catalog.

All data records belonging to the same data series have identical logical structure, meaning that they have the same keywords, links, and data segments. These terms will be defined in more detail below. Keywords and links will also be referred to as meta-data.

The JSOC Application Programming Interface (API) will provide a set of functions, with bindings to host languages including C, FORTRAN, IDL, and maybe MATLAB, that allow programs to connect to the JSOC environment and retrieve and manipulate data records. The API will contain groups of functions that

• create, read or update data records,
• query the JSOC catalog database to retrieve data records whose keywords satisfy a given condition,
• get and set the contents of keywords, links and data segments,
• create new or modify existing data series.