#mozsprint 2016: notes

[RaoOfPhysics]

Thanks to @tpmccauley for these!

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OpenCosmics and the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint 2016

There are many current and future cosmic ray projects that make detectors, software, and data available to the public in various ways. These projects include:

• QuarkNet https://www.i2u2.org/elab/cosmic/home/project.jsp
• HiSPARC http://www.hisparc.nl/en/
• CROP http://crop.unl.edu/
• CosmicPi http://cosmicpi.org/
• ERGO http://www.ergotelescope.org

The aim of Open Cosmics is to build a foundational structure for the many cosmic-ray projects around the globe by providing:

• a standard data format and schema for cosmic-ray data,
• a repository for storing the data and
• the software tools for analysing the data.

More information:

• https://github.com/OpenCosmics/opencosmics.github.io
• https://science.mozilla.org/projects/open-cosmics

On June 2-3 some of the OpenCosmics team (Hugo Day [@Tontonis], Tom McCauley [@tpmccauley], Achintya Rao [@RaoOfPhysics], Tom Whyntie [@twhyntie]) participated in the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint.

A: What is it?
Q: “This two-day sprint event brings together researchers, coders, librarians and the public from around the globe to hack on open science and open data projects in their communities.”

• https://science.mozilla.org/programs/events/global-sprint-2016
• https://github.com/mozillascience/global-sprint-2016/issues

The OpenCosmics sprint was hosted at CERN in the IdeaSquare (http://ideasquare.web.cern.ch/).

The goal: to have at least two different cosmic-ray datasets analyzed
with the same code (python in a jupyter notebook form).

What happened?

• HiSPARC data are available via the web and they have a well-developed software framework for analysis: https://github.com/HiSPARC/sapphire
• QuarkNet cosmic ray data are also available via the web and has a well-developed online-analysis environment: https://www.i2u2.org/elab/cosmic/home/project.jsp
• It was decided that rather than re-invent the wheel and create a new software analysis environment from scratch it might be a good exercise to see if QuarkNet cosmic ray data could be analyzed using sapphire from HiSPARC
• Offline advice was provided by the members of the HiSPARC team (via gitter) and by QuarkNet (via email); documentation from both groups aided as well
• @Tontonis worked on converting QuarkNet data into the HiSPARC format
• @twhyntie and @tpmccauley worked on geographical rendering of the HiSPARC and QuarkNet detector stations
• @RaoOfPhysics organized the whole event
• Notebooks from the day (and follow-ups from later) can be found here: https://github.com/OpenCosmics/cosmic-jupyter
• While the goal of having two different datasets analyzed with the same software was not achieved (an ambitious goal for just two days of work) great progress was made and a lot was learned. It’s a good base on which to build and a great kick-start for the project.