Standardizing and validating Solar Datasets, the SOLARNET project

Standardizing data product metadata is essential for effective data sharing and analysis across scientific disciplines. The SOLARNET project addresses this need in solar physics by defining data and metadata standards for solar observations. These standards are designed to facilitate collaboration and data integration across diverse observatories and instruments, including ground-based, earth-orbiting, and deep-space missions. To support the adoption of these standards, the Space Weather Science Operations Center (SWxSOC) is collaborating with the original SOLARNET metadata authors, the International Heliophysics Data Environment Alliance (IHDEA), and the NASA Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC) to develop an open-source Python package.

The SOLARNET metadata package is built upon existing libraries like Astropy and SunPy, allowing it to be easily integrated into scientific ecosystems, data pipelines, and science data processing systems. It automates the validation of FITS metadata, ensuring compliance with SOLARNET standards, and provides tools for generating FITS header templates. By simplifying metadata management, the package reduces complexity for researchers and pipeline developers, promoting consistency, and enhancing interoperability of solar observation data.

This presentation will demonstrate the key features of the package, its applications in streamlining data processing workflows, and highlight its role in fostering greater collaboration within the solar physics community. Attendees will gain insights into how this tool can be leveraged to improve data standardization and reusability in their own research and development. Through this work, we aim to contribute to the broader goal of making solar observation data more accessible and usable, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery in the field.