The capacity-building and science-enabling activities of the IUGONET for the solar-terrestrial research community

[Background]This paper presents an overview of the capacity-building activities and science-enabling services of the Inter-university Upper atmosphere Global Observation NETwork (IUGONET) project. This Japanese program, which started in 2009, is building a metadata database (MDDB) of ground-based observations and is developing an analysis software to handle the data linked to the MDDB system for use by the solar-terrestrial physics community. Because the institutional members of the IUGONET are mainly universities in Japan, we explore tools that can contribute to advanced education as well as promote research activities. [Findings]In this paper, we describe the utilities of the IUGONET for education, including our capacity-building activities in developing countries. We have regularly facilitated training seminars for Japanese students on the use of our tools (IUGONET MDDB and the software), and we have held capacity-building seminars for young scientists in developing countries. In addition to the MDDB, we have prepared various ‘gateway’ tools for users who are unfamiliar with ‘keywords’ to search for data. One of these is a geographical display tool that uses Google Earth (KML file), which is included as supplemental material to this paper. The usefulness of the IUGONET has been proven over its first 5 years of operation by the increasing number of its users, which has led to the production of approximately 500 scientific papers, including 42 thesis papers. [Conclusions]The IUGONET community collaborates with the Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics program, not only in its scientific activities, but also in the establishment of E-infrastructure and capacity building

Solar-Terrestrial Data Analysis and Reference System (STARS) - Its High Potentiality for Collaborative Research

Cross-sectional studies have become important for an improved understanding of various Solar-Terrestrial Physics (STP) fields, given the great variety and different types of observations from the Sun to the Earth. In order to better combine, compare, and analyze different types of data together, a system named STARS (Solar-Terrestrial data Analysis and Reference System) has been developed. Cross-sectional study requires cooperative work. STARS has two functions for cooperative work, the "Stars Project List (SPL)" and the "Event Listing". The SPL is used for exchanges of plotting information by cooperating persons. The event list database provides all users of STARS hints for recognizing typical occurrences of STP phenomena