Proprietary Data

The CANFAR/CADC Group system enables controlled access to particular datasets.

Each telescopic observations is protected from anonymous access while the current date is before the Release Date specified in the related CAOM record. If no CAOM record is available for a given observation, that observation is considered private. All private data can only be accessed by members of special authorzation groups that are associated with observations via its CAOM record.

Every telecsope observation can be access by members of two special groups. The archive group and the proposal group.

Archive Group

The archive group name is established by the CADC when the telescope archive is first created. Members of that group have priviledge access to all data in the given telescope's archive and have the ability to add new observations to the archive.

Proposal Groups

When a CAOM record is created the value of the proposal_id attribute can be set. The CADC automatically allows members of the ARHCIVE-proposal_id group priviledge access to all observations associated with the given proposal_id. These groups can be created by the members of the Archive Group or they are automatically created when the first CAOM record for a given proposal_id is added to the CADC CAOM database.

Initially, only members of the Archive Group and add CADC users to a given Proposal Group. Any member of the Archive Group can, hwoever, added any CADC user as an administrator of a Proposal Group associated with that archive. Adding a member to the Administrative Group of an Archive Group allows that user to add other CADC users to the Proposal Group, thus providing data sharing. Normally the an member of the Archive Group will make the User ID of the PI of a proposal the Administrator of a Proposal Group.

The Group membership is managed via a web UI or via the Python tools.