Data Schema

Support Aurora: GitHub Sponsors · Patreon · Buy Me a Coffee

SolarHub uses a standardized JSON Lines (JSONL) format for all solar task and annotation data.

Format: Compressed JSONL

Every data file in the repository (under data/ and annotations/) is a .jsonl file. Each line is a single, independent, and minified JSON object representing one solar observation record.

---

Task Record Schema

Each task is represented as a single minified line in a .jsonl file, with fields ordered as follows: id, url, task_type, created_at, metadata, annotations.

{
  "id": "sp-1234",
  "url": "http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/2026/03/16/000000_Ic_1k.jpg",
  "task_type": "sunspot",
  "created_at": "2026-03-17T00:30:00Z",
  "metadata": {
    "source": "JSOC_HMI_JPG",
    "captured_at": "2026-03-16"
  },
  "annotations": [
    {
      "user": "github_username",
      "confidence_score": 95.0,
      "locations": [
        { "label": "class_f", "region": "450000 15 1009 15" }
      ],
      "issue_number": 42,
      "timestamp": "2026-03-17T14:30:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

Field Definitions

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Primary Key: Unique global identifier (e.g., sp-94, mg-102). Persists across years of data.
url	string	Direct link to the solar observation image.
task_type	string	Scientific category (sunspot, magnetogram, etc.).
created_at	string	Record creation timestamp (ISO 8601).
metadata	object	System Only: Reserved for backend metadata (source, capture date).
annotations	list	A list of user annotation entries. Each entry contains user, confidence_score, locations, issue_number, and timestamp.

---

Annotation Entry Structure

Each entry in the annotations list represents a contribution from a single user.

Field	Type	Description
user	string	GitHub username.
confidence_score	float	Contributor's self-reported confidence (0-100).
locations	list	Array of point/region objects.
issue_number	integer	Submission source issue.
timestamp	string	Contribution timestamp.

Location Object

{ "label": "class_f", "region": "450000 15 1009 15" }

Labels are applied to specific regions via the region field. The parser stores each region payload exactly as submitted by the contributor (no transformation). This means the value may contain RLE, polygon coordinates, circles, or any other accepted task-specific encoding. There is no image-wide label field.

Contribution Constraint

For each record id, a given GitHub user can appear at most once in annotations. If the same user tries to submit another annotation for the same record, the parser rejects it and returns an error.