Hippo is a piece of software aimed at making FAIR (Findable, Attributable, Interoperable, and Reuseable) data access easier. Through the use of the very flexible MongoDB for true metadata storage and MinIO as a data storage backend, hippo provides metadata-driven access to reusable products.
Hippo is under development for the Advanced Simons Observatory, an NSF-funded telescope project that aims to study, among other things, the Cosmic Microwave Background. Throughout the project, many pieces of data will be produced: things like images, arrays, small databases, etc. Storing and sharing these within the collaboration, and to the public, is a huge challenge; it's easy enough to put them all in a big folder somewhere, but without associated metadata you will never be able to find what you're looking for.
Enter hippo! Hippo allows you to upload data products and access them both manually and programatically through a metadata-driven interaction.
There are a number of example cases in the example directory. To lauch the development
server, you should run
python3 examples/simpleserve.py
This will create a test account (admin) with API key TEST_API_KEY and password
TEST_PASSWORD. You can use the upload scripts in examples/{name} that upload
data from the NASA LAMBDA instance.
You may need to copy config.json to ~/.hippo.conf to correctly load the environment
or export appropriate variables.
Products can then be viewed through the web interface (served at /web from the
server root), or through the use of the henry command-line tool.