Exploring Metadata in Pulsar Astronomy - Master Thesis

Abstract

The majority of information about pulsars comes from their observational data. However, pulsar metadata are often not explored in detail, even though the potential applications of them range from identifying outliers in data processing and analysis, through processing pipelines evaluation, augmenting data provenance with additional information to general purpose data management. Typically, pulsar data are stored in PSRFITS files as a complete archive, including metadata. A commonly used library for pulsar data processing and analysis, PSRCHIVE, enables the user to also access all metadata. However, it is close to impossible to manually explore them for a whole collection of data in an efficient manner. One of the solutions is organising all metadata of a given data collection in a central database, providing the users with an access point to browse and explore the metadata. Bridging the gap between complex metadata extraction and a database with all important metadata in it was the motivation and goal of the thesis.