SIMPLE

The vision of the SIMPLE project is to create a collaborative database of low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and directly imaged exoplanets: a simple archive of complex objects. The tables and fields currently included in the database are described in the Documentation and currently include names, coordinates, photometry and reference and data provenance information and is visualized in the schema below. We are currently working on including kinematics, spectra, images, and modeled and retrieved parameters.

We are developing several different methods to interact with the database, including python, a website and API, and database browsers.

While we are using brown dwarfs to build out the SIMPLE database, our intention is to build a database schema and software which could be used by other subfields to roll their own collaborative databases and web interfaces.

This database uses the SQLAlchemy ORM and is designed to be interacted with via the astrodbkit2 package.

If you'd like to participate or just stay in the loop as this project progresses, please request to join this discussion list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/simple-archive

For day-to-day discussions, please join us in the #simple-db-dev channel in the Astropy Slack workspace. If you are not already in the Astropy Slack, request an account.

To see more details about how this project got started and our initial discussions, check out the archived running notes in the Wiki.

Getting Started

If you'd like to set up your own copy of the SIMPLE database, here's what we recommend:

1. Clone or download a copy of this repo locally onto your computer.

2. Set up an environment for the python code. A conda environment file environment.yml exists for convenience. The following commands will use that file to create and activate an environment called simple-db:

   conda env create -f environment.yml
   conda activate simple-db

3. Install the latest version of the AstrodbKit2 package:

    pip install git+https://github.com/dr-rodriguez/AstrodbKit2

4. Create an empty database and import the SIMPLE schema, and connect the database file SIMPLE.db as a Database object called `db

   from astrodbkit2.astrodb import create_database,Database
   from simple.schema import *
   
   connection_string = 'sqlite:///SIMPLE.db' # connection string for a SQLite database named SIMPLE.db
   create_database(connection_string)
   db = Database(connection_string)

5. Load in the database by reading in the directory where the JSON files are located

   db.load_database('data/')

6. Use astrodbkit2 to explore, query, and/or modify the database. For example:

   • Find all objects in the database with "0141" in the name

     db.search_object('0141', fmt='astropy')
     

   • See all the data in the database for 2MASS J01415823-4633574

     db.inventory('2MASS J01415823-4633574', pretty_print=True)
     

SIMPLE Database Schema

The schema for the SIMPLE database is described in the Documentation and can be found in simple/schema.py.

A graphical representation of the SIMPLE schema: