Metadata Extraction from Raw Astroparticle Data of TAIGA Experiment

Abstract: Today, the operating TAIGA (Tunka Advanced Instrument for cosmic rays and Gamma Astronomy) experiment continuously produces and accumulates a large volume of raw astroparticle data. To be available for the scientific community these data should be well-described and formally characterized. The use of metadata makes it possible to search for and to aggregate digital objects (e.g. events and runs) by time and equipment through a unified interface to access them. The important part of the metadata is hidden and scattered in folder/files names and package headers. Such metadata should be extracted from binary files, transformed to a unified form of digital objects, and loaded into the catalog. To address this challenge we developed a concept of the metadata extractor that can be extended by facility-specific extraction modules. It is designed to automatically collect descriptive metadata from raw data files of all TAIGA formats.