Centre de données de la physique des plasmas Original Research Article

The Centre de Données de la Physique des Plasmas (CDPP)1 was developed in France and opened its service in 1999. Its primary objectives are: • the long-term preservation of data from space or ground-based French contributions to experiments in the field of space plasma physics; • the provision of easy access to this data for the international scientific community; • the introduction of “Value Added Services” designed to facilitate scientific analysis of this data. Plasma physics has always been strongly supported by the French space science community. A large effort was initially expended to save (convert to a stable long-term format) and then archive (make comprehensible) data from past missions such as ARCAD-3, GEOS, ISEE, and VIKING. More recently activity has turned to recent or current missions, such as EISCAT, INTERBALL, WIND, and CLUSTER. The tools currently available at the CDPP are described: search tools, on-line quick-look data, syntactic and semantic data descriptions, documentation describing the instruments and data sets, data request and pre-processing possibilities, more general information about plasma physics, and the outreach pages. It is clear that only close international collaboration between data centres is capable of providing the scientific community with all the data it needs and the tools required to analyse it. Complementarity must exist between data centres, together with interoperability of both the search engines and the data retrieval tools. All this implies some degree of standardisation of formats for both the data and the meta-data.