Putting the pieces together...

Ivo Busko busko at stsci.edu
Thu May 13 13:13:17 PDT 2004


Thomas McGlynn wrote:
<snip>
>    Issue 8.C.  This is a hard step.  How does VSPlot know enough to distinguish
>    between raw and background subtracted spectra and the myriad details like that?
>    Is this a characeristic of the flux column or of the entire spectral file?
>    This seems to be where all of the discussion of measurements and quantities
>    needs to provide some benefit to the user.

An extra little nastiness to this is the issue of data quality values.
There might be instrument-dependent data quality values associated
with the flux values. How to handle them in an instrument-independent
way? The user may want to build a query that will retrieve data with
"less
serious" anomalies (on a per sample basis), but will discard data with 
"serious anomalies". 

We already faced a similar problem within the AVO Science Demo context
when 
ingesting ISO data. Since it is a prototype, we hard-coded the solution
in 
the software, but that approach clearly won't work in a production
environment.

-Ivo

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 *  Ivo C. Busko, PhD                        e-mail: busko at stsci.edu *
 *  Senior Systems Software Engineer                                 *
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