The Data Management team of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has developed a data description language and toolset, Felis, for defining the semantics and metadata of its public-facing data catalogs. Felis uses a rich Pydantic data model for describing and validating catalog metadata, expressed as a human-readable and editable YAML format. Felis also provides a Python library and command line interface for working with these data models. The metadata is used to populate the TAP_SCHEMA tables for the IVOA TAP services utilized by the Rubin Science Platform (RSP). Felis's current capabilities will be discussed along with some future plans.
@article{arxiv.2412.09721,
title = {Using Felis to Represent the Semantics and Metadata of Astronomical Data Catalogs},
author = {Jeremy McCormick and Gregory P. Dubois-Felsmann and Andrei Salnikov and Brian Van Klaveren and Tim Jenness},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09721},
year = {2024}
}