NASA Heliophysics Event List Manager (HELM)

Heliophysics Event List Manager (HELM) is a project of the Space Physics Data Facility in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. HELM aims to improve queries and enable annotating and intersecting lists of events across a full range of Heliophysics data sources, both published and dynamically generated. Read more in the proposal.

The key organizing element for most Heliophysics research is time: times when an “event” of a given character occur or time spans when some condition is true. A list of such times may be created through a hands-on science analysis process for a specific research project (e.g., a list of bow-shock crossing times for a study of properties of the bow shock) or may be generated through automated services (e.g., times when the observed interplanetary magnetic field at Earth is southward by >2 nT). We are developing a Heliophysics Event List Management service (HELM) that will improve queries and enable annotating and intersecting lists of events across a full range of Heliophysics data sources, both published and dynamically generated. HELM lists will be kept in a standard (but expandable) XML format, keyed to appropriate SPASE terms. The lists and list intersections are passed directly through a HELM user interface or to intermediate services via a HELM API. This will be a major improvement over how scientists manually generate, manage and share lists of observations and is an important capability to leverage the VxOs. For example, starting from the HELM master list or from individual query services, you could query OMNIweb for times meeting some set of geophysical states and pass the list to the list server. From within SSCweb, you can find when spacecraft are in suitable regions of space and determine intersections of the two lists with the HELM list service. Finally send that list of times and spacecraft to VMO for data retrieval, plotting or statistics. You could then publish a useful list for others to use and allow others to add or comment. The various VxOs and SPDF (CDAWeb, SSCWeb, OMNIweb) are all collaborating on this effort.

HELM is developing common SPASE-based query and results formats with the VxOs and SPDF, and building an event list management server to store and manipulate those lists. The event list server will enable capturing these lists, merging and intersecting them, allow commenting and extending them, publishing them, and most importantly sending the lists to other services for selecting and plotting data. This will be a major improvement over how scientists currently manually generate, manage and share lists of observations and is an important capability to leverage the VxOs.