LSST Science Platform Vision Document

Abstract

This document defines and describes the “LSST Science Platform”, a set of integrated web applications and services deployed at the LSST Data Access Centers (DACs) through which the scientific community will access, visualize, subset and perform next-to-the-data analysis of the data collected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
These services can be broken down to three different aspects: a web Portal, designed to provide essential data access and visualization services through a simple-to-use website, a JupyterLab environment, that will provide a Jupyter Notebook-like interface enabling next-to-the-data analysis, and an extensive set of Web APIs that the users will be able to use to remotely examine the LSST data set using tools they’re already familiar with.
This document lays out the high-level vision for the aforementioned aspects and some associated backend services. It is intentionally brief, and meant to generally guide the flow-down of requirements and development product specifications, prioritization, and plans for the Agile development of the relevant elements of the DM system.