This document contains various proposals how the FLARECAST REST API could look like The idea is that all algorithms communicate through REST URLs with the databases.

URLs are used to create, read, update and delete records (CRUD). As data exchange format we propose to use JSON. JSON can be natively read by many programming languages, such as Python, IDL, Java, JavaScript, ...

This document does not contain a normative definition of the API, but rather examples that can be used for further discussions.

 

As illustrated in the Architecture overview the FLARECAST infrastructure consists of several logical databases. All of these databases store different types of resources.

DatabaseResource
Data ArchiveObservation (e.g. FITS-Files)
Staging TableEvent, ... (e.g. Event lists)
Feature Property DatabaseFeature (such as Active Regions), FeatureProperty (e.g. Area, Contour, Zurich-Class, ...)
Predictions Config DBScalars, Vectors, Matrices (e.g. Algo-Configurations)
Prediction DB?
Infrastructure Configuration DBAlgorithm, Person,

 

Standards

Dates should be in ISO 8601

Date/Time formats should follow http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

This is a test to see if we can create inline comments  And follow up

 

 

The API is self-documenting such that there a single entry point to all databases. This would be access to the resources.

Resources

Anything accessible through the API is a "resource". All available resources can be listed.

Get list of observation types
Queryhttps://api.flarecast.eu/resources/list
Result
{
	{
    "people" : {
        "description": "Persons or groups responsible",
        "baseURL": "https://api.flarecast.eu/people/"
    },
    "algorithms" : {
        "description" : "Registered algorithms (read-only)",
        "baseURL" : "https://api.flarecast.eu/algorithms/"
    },

    "features" : {
        "description" : "Features accessible through this API",
        "baseURL" : "https://api.flarecast.eu/features/"
    },
    
    "observations" : {
        "description" : "Observations accessible through this API",
        "baseURL" : "https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/"
    },
	...
 }

Observations

The file archive is basically a directory structure from where the files can be loaded through the http:// protocol.

Get list of available observations
Query

https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/list

Result
{
	"sdo_hmi_720" : {
		"description" : "SDO HMI",
		"baseURL" : "https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/sdo/hmi/fits/",
		"filepattern": "${YYYY}/${MM}/${DD}/hmi.M_720s_nrt.${YYMMDD}_${nr}_TAI.fits"
		"startDate": "2015-01-01T
 },
	"sdo_hmi_45" : { ... }
}

 

 

 

Search for files
Query https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/sdo/hmi/list?timerange=20150101T000000.0-20150101T120000.0
Result
{
	"https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/sdo/hmi/fits/2015/04/20/hmi.M_720s_nrt.20150420_010000_TAI.fits",
	"https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/sdo/hmi/fits/2015/04/20/hmi.M_720s_nrt.20150420_020000_TAI.fits",
	"https://api.flarecast.eu/observations/sdo/hmi/fits/2015/04/20/hmi.M_720s_nrt.20150420_030000_TAI.fits",
	...
}

Feature Properties

 

Get list of features
Query https://api.flarecast.eu/features/list
Result
{
    "id": {
      "type": "long"
    },
    "timestamp": {
      "type": "datetime"
    },
    "area": {
      "type": "double",
      "unit": "m2",
      "version": 5
    },
    "contour": {
      "type": "int[]",
      "description": "chaincode, 0 is left, 1-7 is direction counter clockwise",
      "version": 1
    }
}
Template
Queryhttps://api.flarecast.eu/features/query?time_begin=20150101T000000.0&time_end=20150101T000000.0&fields=id,timestamp,area,contour 
Result
{
    "id": {
      "type": "long"
    },
    "timestamp": {
      "type": "datetime"
    },
    "area": {
      "type": "double",
      "unit": "m2",
      "version": 5
    },
    "contour": {
      "type": "int[]",
      "description": "chaincode, 0 is left, 1-7 is direction counter clockwise",
      "version": 1
    },
    "data": [
      [
        1,
        "2015-01-01T10:20:00.0",
        12321,
        [0,1,1,1,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,7,7,0]
      ],
      [
        2,
        "2015-01-01T10:20:45.0",
        14412,
        [0,1,1,1,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,7,7,0]
      ],
      [
        3,
        "2015-01-01T10:21:30.0",
        14434,
        [0,1,1,1,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,7,7,0]
      ]
    ]
}

 



 

Template

Template
Query 
Result
 

 

2012-04-23T18:25:43.511Z