Action Items and Issues

Next Meeting

The next Data System workshop is scheduled for August 11-12, 1998. This meeting will be directed toward the IMAGE Mission Handbook. All instrument teams and all members of the Theory and Modeling Team can be expected to have a part in writing papers for this major IMAGE document, so mark your calendars. More about the papers that will be needed for the Handbook will be forthcoming. The plan is to have those writing papers present brief outlines of their papers at the next Data System meeting. The intent is to collectively review the planned material, identify needed changes in those articles being written, and additions to the Handbook that may still be needed. As with the previous meetings, this one will be for a day and a half.

Meeting Notes

Prior to digging into IDFS under the tutoring of Chris Gugiolo, we had presentations about the CDAWeb and SMOC activities. We also heard from Mike Hapgood about the Cluster data system work. The decision was made for the SMOC to produce all Level 0.5 telemetry CDROM/DVDs in the "network ordered" format, ala the SwRI IDFS standard. We will use Chris' code to read these files at investigator institutions. It is important to note that the routine for making use of the IDFS formatted telemetry data will be to use IDFS code to read the distribution media and write the IDFS files into a locally held IDFS database. This local, hard disk, database holds the files that the IDFS software then reads. Screen display code and analysis code written to display IDFS formatted instrument telemetry data does not directly read the distribution media.

Randy Gladstone also gave us an update of the SwRI work to link IDFS code to IDL. That work is proceeding well, however it is still at an early stage. The applicability of this work will depend on the porting of the basic IDFS code to desktop platforms. Ivan Glakin is in the lead with porting IDFS to the Windows NT platform; work on this is also being done by Jena Hughey at MSFC. I'm sure you have noticed the recent exchange of messages documenting progress in these areas.

The IDFS tutorial covered considerable material. Many questions remain, however, much progress have been made in broadening our collective understanding of the IDFS structures and code.

Call for Communication

It was noted, at the meeting, that the processes and responsibilities for carrying out data system tasks are not yet all thought out. What specifically will Chris provide? What aspects of the IDFS coding and file loading are the instrument teams responsible for? When does responsibility pass from one to the other. These are examples of the issues, which remain to be worked out. There will be more. When there are issues of task responsibilities and the flow of tasks, that relate to all instrumenters, it will be important to share your questions and particularly your solutions with all instrument teams. You will shortly see the first suggested procedure that addresses the above questions. What seems important is not leaving "fuzzy" areas of responsibility and procedure fuzzy. Question what's fuzzy and suggest solutions; don't make unsubstantiated assumptions.

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