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Last modified by rkwee on 2026-02-16 11:45
From version 13.3
edited by rkwee
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on 2026-02-16 11:31
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1 -SciCat
1 +SciCat - Scientific Metadata Management at DESY
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4 4  
5 5  The challenge in photon and neutron science is to find a standard way of naming characteristics for a huge variety of experiments at beamlines, interconnecting several fields like chemistry, material science, biology, medicine, etc – covering many aspects that influences daily life. Apart from the "normal" physics research there are various other types of research depending on the purpose one can perform at DESY: inhouse, commissioning, industries. In additon, there are differences from PetraIII and FLASH within photon science. All this is reflected in the different treatment of the data taken.
6 6  
7 -One of SciCats strengths is that technically one can impose your own schema, the fields to describe your use case. Many efforts were made at the European scope to use standardised vocabulary such that scientific metadata can be gathered and made findable, accessible and interoperable at first and ultimately reusable, eg. in NFDI and EOSC framed projects. DESY's SciCat system follows those standards,
7 +One of SciCats strengths is that technically one can impose your own schema, the fields to describe your use case. Many efforts were made at the European scope to use standardised vocabulary such that scientific metadata can be gathered and made findable, accessible and interoperable at first and ultimately reusable, eg. in NFDI and EOSC framed projects. DESY's SciCat system follows those standards.
8 8  
9 9  To gain experience so-called _demonstrator beamlines_ where chosen, in 2021 when SciCat was chosen at DESY to be tested. These were: P08 and FLASH. In the next two following years, serveral other have been added, see [SciCat Instances](https://xwiki.desy.de/xwiki/bin/view/IT/SciCat/CICD%20Setup/). These helped to identify missing features and adopt SciCat to DESY needs.
10 10  
11 -### Current state of SciCat at DESY
11 +### Goals for SciCat at DESY
12 12  
13 -Beamline ingestion has been streamlined in 2025 such that there is one single catalogue for all DESY beamlines.
13 +Goal number one is to provide a useful catalogue to the user at DESY. Useful means - among others -
14 14  
15 -###
15 +* Introduce standardised way of defining meta data, FS-EC (under Linus Pithan).
16 +* Use SciCat to help book keeping of what was measured which also helps planning new research studies.
17 +* Use SciCat to issue DOIs: Together with the DESY library develop detailed workflow to help the user make data publication.
18 +* Use SciCat to provide access to experimental data that comply with DESY photon science data Policy and can be made available through DESY resources.
16 16  
20 +### Milestone achieved by January 2026
21 +
22 +Set up of the system to mint DOIs. Any requests can be addressed to _photon-doi@desy.de._
23 +
17 17  ## Step by step guide for the Photon Science DOI minting Service
18 18  
26 +The system is set up such that an internal and public, outward facing SciCat is provided. Into the internal, several PETRA beamlines ingest directly their metadata during beamtime that are P08, P05, P65. The URL is
27 +
28 +[scicat.desy.de](https://scicat.desy.de), it has already more then 100,000 dataset entries where one of them has 160,000 associated datafiles (Feb 2026). It is MFA protected but single sign on is available through keykloak .
29 +
30 +It is connected to the external catalogue, fsdata.desy.de, on which DOIs can be minted for selected datasets from the internal catalogue.
31 +
19 19  {{success}}
20 20  A detailed description of how to mint a DOI for your data is described on this [[page|doc:IT.SciCat.Step-by-step DOI minting Guide at DESY.WebHome]].
21 21  {{/success}}
22 22  
23 -### Goals for SciCat at DESY
36 +###
24 24  
25 -Goal number one is to provide a useful catalogue to the user at DESY. Useful means - among others -
38 +## Deployment of SciCat at DESY
26 26  
27 -* introduce standardised way of defining meta data, FS-EC (under Linus Pithan)
28 -* use SciCat to issue DOIs: in agreement with L start setting up a workflow (involved IT-RIC Tim W)
29 -* provide technical support for instances (IT-InFa)
40 +This service is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, managed and configured by gitlab repositories for
30 30  
42 +* templated helm charts for better maintainability.
43 +* a mirror of official repositories of frontend and backend code
44 +* a supplemented service that supports the DESY publication workflow
45 +* the DevOps tool Argo CD to control, configure and monitor the application
46 +
47 +In case you would like more details on the technical setup, please seek more information through our contact persons.
48 +
49 +### Contact
50 +
51 +Peter van der Reest, Johannes Reppin and Regina Hinzmann (to email simply replace spaces by dots and add ATdesy.de at the end).
52 +
31 31  ### Main Links:
32 32  
33 33  * [Official Scicat website](https://scicatproject.github.io)
34 34  * [Official SciCat project repositories](https://github.com/SciCatProject)
35 -* [Official Scicat documentation](https://scicatproject.github.io/documentation/)
36 -* [DESY internal repositories](https://gitlab.desy.de/it-infa/metadata)
57 +* [Official Scicat documentation](https://www.scicatproject.org/user-documentation/main/)