SciCat
General information about SciCat at DESY
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. 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.
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. These helped to identify missing features and adopt SciCat to DESY needs.
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 help book keeping of what was measured which also helps planning new research studies.
- Use SciCat to issue DOIs: Together with the DESY library develop detailed workflow to help the user make data publication.
- Use SciCat to provide access to experimental data that comply with DESY photon science data Policy and can be made available through DESY resources.
Milestone achieved by January 2026:
Set up of the system to mint DOIs.
Step by step guide for the Photon Science DOI minting Service
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
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 .
It is connected to the external catalogue, fsdata.desy.de, on which DOIs can be minted for selected datasets from the internal catalogue.
Deployment of SciCat at DESY
To provide this service