Auxiliary DataΒΆ

Anything that is not a seismic waveform will be stored here. Conceptually this group stores any data array (arbitrary data type and number of dimensions) with associated meta information in an arbitrarily nested path.

/AuxiliaryData Group
Type Group
Full Path /AuxiliaryData
Required False
Description Any data that cannot be considered a waveform will be stored here.

The path is intended to group the data by data type and whatever grouping makes sense for the data at hand. For cross correlations this might be /CrossCorrelations/Station_A/Station_B and for adjoint sources /AdjointSources/Event_A. This is, by design, not fixed within the ASDF format as we are not experts in every field and it would take a long time to come up with the definitions. Additionally many areas are still actively researched so flexibility to store any data and meta data in whatever grouping must be retained. The minimum nesting is 1 layer, e.g. one cannot directly attach data to the /AuxiliaryData group.

Each path segment is just an HDF5 group whose name has to match a certain pattern. Keep in mind that you can nest any number of these.

/AuxiliaryData/{...}/{...} Group
Type Group
Full Path /AuxiliaryData/{...}/{...}
RegEx ^[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9_]*[a-zA-Z0-9]$
Required False
Description A group storing further auxiliary data groups and/or actual auxiliary data.

Data itsself is stored in a data set within one of these groups. The name of data set can be freely chosen but has to match the regular expression in the following table.

/AuxiliaryData/{...}/{...}/{TAG} Data Set
Type Data Set
Full Path AuxiliaryData/{...}/{...}/{TAG}
RegEx ^[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9_]*[a-zA-Z0-9]$
Description Auxiliary Data.
Data Type Any data type and dimension. For interoperability best keep to data types supported by HDF5.
Required False

Meta information is stored as attributes on the data sets and they are once again completely free form and highly dependent on the application. The only reserved attribute is the provenance_id attribute which works exactly as in the waveform traces.

Provenance for a particular piece of auxiliary data can be stored as an identifier to a certain provenance record which represents that piece of data. It is possible (and recommended) but not necessary that a provenance document in the Provenance contains a record with that id.

provenance_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name provenance_id
Description The id of a provenance record representing the current state of the auxiliary data piece.
Required False
Details
ATTRIBUTE "provenance_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}