Data Central Ingestion Documentation
Warning
Please be aware that we are in the process of modernising our models to facilitate a new release of Data Central. To support this we have paused the acceptance of new data until April 2026. Please don’t generate any metadata for your upcoming Data Central data, as there will be changes to the metadata format that will supersede your work. Our documentation will be updated when we are ready to receive your metadata, and we will notify you through our usual channels: the ASA mailing list, and the datacentral-announce Slack channel.
If you have any questions, please contact us.
Note
Please be aware that this is a living document. Although Data Central will take every effort to minimise the changes to the format of the metadata required, we may from time to time make changes to these requirements in order to deliver the best possible user experience.
Data Central simplifies astronomical data releases by automating the ingestion, versioning, web-based data access, and hosting of your data and supporting documentation.
Data Central has many features for hosting astronomical data including:
Image Cutout service produces publication-quality single-band or rgb images with custom image scaling options, FITS creation, overplotting sources from Data Central-hosted and remote catalogues, batch mode, contours and more, over 30 bands across the GAMA and DEVILS regions (with VHS data coming soon)
Single Object Viewer including image cutout at source position, data product download, 2D map visualiser, tabular data
Cone Search service including remote source position overlays
Auto-generated, interactive, intuitive Schema Browser
ADQL Catalogue Query service; return records that match some criteria from the catalogues hosted at Data Central
TAP service
Authenticated users can re-visit the history of their query, cutout, or cone search
Your data will be discoverable alongside many of Australia’s national optical surveys. Data Central also provides access to our in-house CMS, Documentation Central, for your survey team to curate the data-release’s supporting documentation.
Tip
Data Central hosts several different types of documentation for survey teams:
static documentation on a specific data release (appearing in the Schema Browser)
updatable documentation about a survey (Documentation Central)
team wikis
Only the first of these is discussed in the ingestion documentation, and only the first of these needs to be provided by the survey/data team before ingestion can begin. The others can be changed at any time, outside of the constraints of the ingestion process.
Think of the first as a paper—you cannot change it once you’ve published it, you can only publish a new paper with the corrections (allowing citations)—whereas the others are like wikipedia, in that the content can be continuously updated, and hence is a poor source for citation.