The SWIT-eSWua system: managing, preservation and sharing of the
historical and near real-time ionospheric data at the INGV
Abstract
The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) has a long
tradition in collecting scientific data to support upper atmosphere
physics research. In addition to the historical equipment no longer
operative, an ever-growing number of permanent observatories at high,
low, and middle latitudes are part of the INGV network dedicated to the
ionospheric and Space Weather monitoring. The management of the data
produced by such a dynamic infrastructure required the development of an
IT system capable to fulfill several requirements. Among them, the
capability to manage and provide access to the continuous flow of
information produced by the remote instruments and, at the same time,
guarantee the preservation and availability of the historical series, a
valuable legacy of this scientific field. To meet these needs, the
SWIT-eSWua system was developed and has recently came into operation.
The SWIT (Space Weather Information Technology) database management
system can store a huge amount of spatially and temporally distributed
data, standardizing the observations performed by different instruments
and making them available in near real-time. The system is based on
open-source software and containers-based virtualization, an
architecture that potentially could be deployed in other research
facilities to realize a distributed ionospheric monitoring network. The
eSWua (electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere) access layer includes
several services that allow to share these data with the scientific
community. The web-platform (www.eswua.ingv.it) allows to explore,
analyse and download all the different kind of historical and real-time
data collected by SWIT at multiple levels of elaboration. A dedicated
RESTful web-service, a registry for the metadata, the implementation of
open data policy and persistent identifiers are just some of the other
components which are being integrated into this layer. This work will
provide a global view of the SWIT-eSWua architecture and describe the
best practices implemented toward the long-term preservation of these
data and the realization of a FAIR ecosystem.