VESPA-Cloud

VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access, Erard et al. EPSC2020-190, 2020) is a network of interoperable data services covering all fields of Solar System Sciences. It is a mature project, developed within EUROPLANET-FP7 and EUROPLANET-2020-RI. The latter ended in Aug. 2019. It is further supported under the EUROPLANET-2024-RI project (started in Feb. 2020).

The VESPA data providers are using a standard API (based on the Table Access Protocol of IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) and EPNcore, a common dictionary of metadata developed by the VESPA team). The VESPA services consist in searchable metadata tables, with links (URLs) to science data products (files, web-services...). The VESPA metadata includes relevant keywords for scientific data discovery, such as data coverage (temporal, spectral, spatial...), data content (physical parameters, processing level...), data origin (observatory, instrument, publisher...) or data access (format, URL, size...). VESPA hence provides a unified data discovery service for Solar System Sciences.

The architecture of the VESPA network is distributed (the metadata tables are hosted and maintained by the VESPA providers), but it is not redundant. The hosting and maintenance of VESPA provider's servers has proved to be a single point failure for small teams with little IT support. The VESPA-Cloud project with EOSC-Hub will greatly facilitate the sustainability of data sharing from small teams as well as teams, whose institutions have restrictive firewall policies (like labs hosted by space agencies, e.g., DLR in Germany). Most of the VESPA data provider are using the same server software, namely DaCHS (Data Centre Helper Suite), developed by the Heidelberg team included in the project.

VESPA-Cloud provides a cloud-hosted facility to host VESPA compliant metadata tables in a controlled and maintained software environment. The VESPA providers will focus on the science application configuration, whereas the VESPA core team will support them with the maintenance of the deployed instances. The development of the VESPA provider’s data service will be done using a git versioning system (github or institute gitlab).
An instance of the VESPA query interface portal will also be implemented on EOSC-hub provided virtual machine.

The community AAI (Authorization and Authentication Infrastructure) is provided by GÉANT, through its eduTEAMS service. In the context of EOSC-hub, the EGI Federation is providing virtual machine services from IN2P3 and CESNET while data storage and registry services will be provided by EUDAT.    

In the course of the VESPA-Cloud project, we will implement in the DaCHS framework cloud-storage API connectors (such as Amazon S3, iRODS, etc.) to read data in the cloud and ingesting metadata. Since DacHS is used worldwide by many datacenters to share astronomical and solar system data collections, many teams will benefit from this development. 

The Europlanet-2024 Research Infrastructure project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149. This work used the EGI Infrastructure with the dedicated support of IN2P3-IRES and CESNET-MCC. The eduTEAMS Service is made possible via funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).