Letter to the ISO community:
Highly Processed Data Products

 
  Dear ISO astronomer,
   
  Five years after the end of the ISO mission, its data continues to be an 
  exemplary resource for scientific exploitation. To date, just over one 
  thousand papers based on ISO results have been published in refereed 
  literature, and the rate has not yet peaked. ISO data has yielded an 
  abundance of exciting discoveries and many more are still to be expected.
 
  Many papers are based on a systematic reduction of ISO data, producing 
  what we call 'Highly Processed Data Products' (HPDP). These products 
  include DATA (images, spectra etc.), which have been processed beyond the 
  pipeline and/or using new, refined algorithms and therefore have been 
  improved to any degree compared to the OLP 10 products, as well as any 
  resulting CATALOGUES and ATLASES.  In this direction, projects have been 
  undertaken by the ISO Data Centre, in collaboration with the national  
  instrument data centres, for systematic data reduction of specific 
  instrument modes, that will produce homogeneous sets of HPDP.
  
  One of the objectives of the ISO Active Archive Phase is to enhance the 
  ISO Data Archive to host these new products. Version 6 of the IDA (release 
  planned for July this year) will have the functionality to continuously 
  ingest new data, catalogues and atlases. All datasets (i.e. including 
  HPDP) will be queriable and retrievable, in a user-friendly way.
   
        With this letter we invite and encourage you to participate in the
        enrichment of the contents of the ISO Data Archive by providing the
        results of your personal ISO data reduction for ingestion as Highly 
        Processed Data Products into the archive.
  
  The availability of Highly Processed Data Products in the ISO Data Archive 
  is a valuable asset and will boost the scientific exploitation of ISO data 
  by the general astronomical community by providing readily useable scien-
  tific data products.  In addition, this will make the results of your work 
  highly visible to the world-wide astronomical community, even more so when 
  one considers the foreseen integration of the ISO Data Archive into the 
  Virtual Observatories of the future.
  
  We want to minimise the effort on your side in organising the material 
  (data and documentation) for suitable ingestion into the archive. If you 
  are interested (and I hope you are) in providing your data simply send an 
  e-mail to the ISO helpdesk (helpdesk@iso.vilspa.esa.es) with subject 
  'Highly Processed Data Products'. The ISO Data Centre will contact you 
  shortly after and take care of the details of the ingestion. Clearly, we 
  must to preserve some standards (e.g. in documentation, file formats) in 
  order to facilitate the work of the ISO Data Archive user, but we will 
  provide full support for this.
  
  I very much hope to receive a positive answer from you. 
   
   Best regards,
   
   Alberto Salama
   ISO Project Scientist
   
   helpdesk@iso.vilspa.esa.es
   http://www.iso.vilspa.esa.es/