Zorba Sonia

Abstract Reference: 30795
Identifier: P8.29
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 8 Other 

APOGEO: an automatic management system for astronomical portals

Authors:
Zorba Sonia, Bignamini Andrea, Cepparo Francesco, Knapic Cristina, Molinaro Marco, Smareglia Riccardo

The Italian center for Astronomical Archives (IA2) hosts several web interfaces to provide access to astronomical data acquired by various telescopes. Building, management and maintenance of these portals could take a lot of time and errors can be introduced by unsafe changes. Because these search interfaces have similar requirements it was possible to develop a tool that is able to generate these portals in a standardized and reliable way, after a portal administrator has performed an aided configuration process. The tool, called APOGEO (Automatic POrtal GEneratOr), consists in a set of Java EE web applications: a TAP_SCHEMA Manager, a portal skeleton, a generator wizard and a web service for managing asynchronous portal jobs. The TAP_SCHEMA Manager is used to configure the TAP_SCHEMA of the astronomical archive of which one wants to generate the portal. The TAP_SCHEMA is a particular database schema defined in the Virtual Observatory TAP standard and it is used to store metadata of other schemas. Data stored into the TAP_SCHEMA is used by the generator wizard to retrieve information about the astronomical archive structure. The wizard has a set of forms that allow inserting configuration data and an interactive JavaScript tool that can be used to set up position of search interface components (labels, inputs, drop down menus) simply using the mouse. On the final step the wizard adds to the portal skeleton some generated files and builds a war package that can be deployed inside an application server (like GlassFish or Tomcat). The generated portal has a search form that allows searching on the archive. Search results consist in a paginated table that shows data acquired by the scientific instruments and, possibly, the links to the related files, if the user has access policy to the actual data. The generated portal can be used both by anonymous and registered users. Users authorization is managed using Grouper, an enterprise access management system provided by the Internet2 Community. Generated portals include also features for downloading multiple files as a tar archive and generating VOTables. This tasks are performed by the asynchronous service, that exploits the IVOA UWS recommendation. Moreover metadata tables and data files can be sent using SAMP messaging protocol.