Structuring Metadata for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

Abstract

The landscape of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy is changing drastically with the perspective of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) composed of more than 100 Cherenkov telescopes. For the first time in this energy domain, CTA will be operated as an observatory open to the astronomy community. In this context, a structured high level data model is being developed to describe a CTA observation. The data model includes different classes of metadata on the project definition, the configuration of the instrument, the ambient conditions, the data acquisition and the data processing. This last part relies on the Provenance Data Model developed within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), for which CTA is one of the main use cases. The CTA data model should also be compatible with the Virtual Observatory (VO) for data diffusion. We have thus developed a web-based data diffusion prototype to test this requirement and ensure the compliance.