Nuria Lorente (NRAO)
Alongside the visibility data produced during each ALMA observation, the telescope on-line system collects, processes and archives meta and auxiliary data which describe the observation and inform subsequent data reduction and processing.
These come from various sources, including information and observational requirements provided by the PI through the Observing Tool, telescope monitoring data, and data products generated by the Telescope Calibration system.
This paper will describe ALMA's new design for Data Capturer, the software module which collects, organises and processes these ancilliary data, forming from them the ALMA Science Data Model (SDM) for the observation, to be then archived together with the visibility data.
The new design was driven by a need for extensibility and long-term maintainability of the module, which comprises a state machine at its hub and a cascading dependency model binding together a large number of data handlers.
Slides in PDF format
Paper ID: O21