Speaker
Description
The Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) maintains an archive of over 17 million pre-generated plots containing ephemeris and scientific data from approximately 30 missions spanning five decades of heliophysics research. These plots, contributed by both SPDF staff and mission teams, represent a valuable visual record of heliospheric and magnetospheric observations from historical and ongoing missions. However, the heterogeneous nature of this archive—with inconsistent filename conventions, variable time range specifications, and diverse image dimensions—presented significant challenges for creating a unified browsing interface.
We present Plot Walk, a web-based visualization system designed to provide seamless access to SPDF's diverse plot archive. This presentation will discuss the technical solutions we developed to address key challenges, including: parsing inconsistent temporal metadata from filenames (where some missions provide only start times, others only end times); handling plots with both fixed and variable time ranges; and displaying figures with widely varying dimensions and resolutions in a consistent interface.
Plot Walk features an extensible architecture that allows new plot types to be easily integrated, caching for smooth sequential browsing, navigation controls for stepping through plot series, and inventory visualizations showing data availability. This tool enhances accessibility to SPDF's extensive data archive and demonstrates practical approaches for managing heterogeneous scientific visualization collections.