Simulation Team Website Requirements Assessment

Overview

The LSSTC is launching a new public website at the beginning of July, and it is a good time to assess the Simulations web presence(s) and evaluate what can be improved on and what information we would like to present to the general public and community users.  There is a considerable amount of information in a variety of places - it would be useful to create a "gateway" for all the Simulations information and simplify connecting users with content.  The website that will be replaced is http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/simulations.  There are other sources of information on other websites and on Confluence and the goal would be to organize and link it together in a cohesive way. An example of what it could look like is http://staging.lsst.org/scientists/simulations.

The purpose of this Confluence page is to collect information from each of the Simulations components about who their audience is, what they need/want, and how to provide it.  Please feel free to expand on all the sections - representatives from all components should contribute.

Audiences

For each component (which might be broken down as CatSim, PhoSim, OpSim, LSST Stack, MAF  - redefine or elaborate as needed)  who is the audience and what information are they looking for?

Example use cases:

1. The generally interested public learning more about LSST.
2. Science community users wanting to create their own simulated images.
3. Science community users wanting to use provided simulated images and "truth" catalogs to plan their own science.
4. Science community users wanting to reduce their own survey data using the LSST stack tools.
5. Science community users wanting to run their own cadence simulations.
6. Science community users wanting to download pre-generated simulated surveys and evaluate them using MAF to give feedback on scientific performance.

Content

List the content that is needed to address each of the use cases and where it exists (if it does already) or where it lives (if we need to assemble it).

Some Examples:

1. source catalogs
2. lsst stack - how to download and install, how to use
3. MAF how to download and install, how to run and modify
4. Operations Simulation (audience #5 and #6)
   1. what it is
   2. why it is important
   3. how it works
   4. how to analyze the database (link to MAF)
   5. how to install Opsim and run it
      1. modifySchema and Summary table (link to MAF)
   6. simulated surveys data (link to Tier 1 data and MAF analysis)

Website Architecture (will evolve depending on content)

1. Simulations Overview (Landing page)

   1. An overview of the Simulations team should describe what Simulations is, what we do, and why it is important.  

   2. It could include a diagram and description of the components of Simulations and how they interact or fit together.  

2. other material ...