Using Rosetta with PDF-form metadata input to prepare in situ data for publication

NetCDF is a standard format for scientific data, and allows for metadata (“data about data”) to be included in the data files. This is beneficial for users of data since they will get a description of the data in the same file as the bare data values, and there are several libraries available to read NetCDF files and many analysis and visualisation tools support this format. Rosetta is a web application for converting data in ASCII CSV or Excel files to NetCDF format,and is run in a web browser without installing any plugins. If you have several data files formatted in the same way, you can define a conversion template once and reuse it for all of these data files. The generated NetCDF file, as well as the generated template, can be downloaded to your computer. A PDF form was created during the SFI Smart Ocean project to standardise how scientists. engineers, data managers and project leaders were acknowledged as contributors to the dataset. It enables scientists to document their dataset and add these metadata to a NetCDF file together with the data. In the NERSC SIS project Smart Data Delivery Chains, Rosetta was extended to read metadata from this form making it easier to add global metadata to the NetCDF file. Rosetta can be accessed at https://rosetta.nersc.no/.