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SciCat

Version 12.2 by rkwee on 2026-02-16 10:34

General information about SciCat

SciCat stands for “Science Catalogue” and is generally used as a metadata catalogue for finding back data, addressing thereby the needs of a growing photon and neutron science community. It is used at many large European facilities before it came to DESY in January 2022, like PSI, ESS, MaxIV.

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.

One of SciCats strengths is that technically one can impose your own schema, the fields to describe your use case. These pages describe the current state of SciCat. The ultimate goal is to have a production system of SciCat that serves all beamlines.

To gain experience so-called demonstrator beamlines where chosen, where a test instance of SciCat has been setup. These are: P08 and FLASH. In addition serveral other have been added, see SciCat Instances. These help to identify missing features and adopt SciCat to DESY needs.

Current state of SciCat at DESY

Beamline ingestion has been streamlined such that there is one single catalogue for all DESY beamlines

Goals for SciCat at DESY

Goal number one is to provide a useful catalogue to the user at DESY. Useful means - among others -

  • introduce standardised way of defining meta data, FS-EC (under Linus Pithan)
  • use SciCat to issue DOIs: in agreement with L start setting up a workflow (involved IT-RIC Tim W)
  • provide technical support for instances (IT-InFa)

Step by step guide for the Photon Science DOI minting Service

Success

see this page

Main Links:

Structure draft

  • Infos about the repositories
    • Frontend
    • Backend
    • etc.
  • CI/CD Setup
    • Schedules
    • Process
    • what, why, when
  • Deployment
    • Helm
    • Workflow
    • What is configured where
  • Migration
    • Workflow
  • Kubernetes
    • Structure
  • Scicat and Keycloak
    • Workflow