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SciCat

Version 5.1 by rkwee on 2024-04-17 09:42

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.

Current state of SciCat at DESY

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

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