Fumana Marco

Abstract Reference: 30328
Identifier: P6.10
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 6 Python in Astronomy

PNGS: an API ecosystem for Astronomical Applications Development

Authors:
Fumana Marco, Franzetti Paolo, Garilli Bianca, Scala Paolo Luigi, Scodeggio Marco

PNGS (Pandora Next Generation Software, where Pandora is an acronym for Programs for AstroNomical Data Organization Reduction and Analysis) is a collection of object oriented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) implementing a broad set of functionalities and routines aimed at the manipulation of spectroscopic astronomical data. In particular a subset of GUI-oriented APIs are available. Developed in python for simple and fast adoption with core implementation in C to boost performances. Based on the FASE (Future Astronomical Software Environment) framework, PNGS offers a fully customisable software ecosystem which allows to develop applications spanning the whole spectroscopic data lifecycle, from data classification to its organisation on disk, analisys, reduction, visualization and archiving. The idea of the PNGS APIs collection as an ecosystem has led us to conceive and design them as a modular and independent set of objects, taking into consideration SoC (Separation of Concerns) and encapsulation principles (thus ensuring a consistent naming convention together with comprehensive and coherent interfaces to data) at the same time, the way PNGS is designed makes it simple to expand this ecosystem in terms of new functionalities and data containers. PNGS APIs have been used to implement the recent, improved versions of VIPGI (VIMOS Pipeline Interactive Graphical Interface) and EZ (Easy-Z) tools: the former is a graphical application for data reduction and organization, while the latter is an integrated environment for spectra analisys and visualisation.