D3 - A system for recording complex experiments with an extension of SigMF
Abstract
The Signal Metadata Format (SigMF) is an emerging data interchange format (Hilburn, 2018 ) that specifies a way to describe recorded digital signal samples with metadata written in JSON (ECMA-404 ). We broaden this idea to describe experiments , which are collections of related signals. and the associated sensors that collect them.
We were motivated to develop this extension by a real-world problem. DARPA’s Aerial Dragnet Program (DARPA , 2016 ), observes Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (i.e., drones), with multiple simultaneous sensors with the goal of several answering analytic questions (e.g., what is the identity of the drone?). Given the combinatorial explosion of possible experimental observations and the large data sizes involved, we needed a simple way to catalog and discover relevant data sets without having to download them first.
This paper describes our data collection and distribution use case, the SigMF-inspired extension we developed, and our experience with using the resulting JSON to build an experimental data browser christened D3 - for Drone Data Distribution system.
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