DIBBS: Long Term Access to Large Scientific Data Sets: The SkyServer and Beyond

SciServer is a science platform built and supported by the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. SciServer extends the SkyServer system of server-side tools that introduced the astronomical community to SQL and has been serving the Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalog data to the public. SciServer uses a Docker based architecture to provide interactive and batch mode server-side analysis with scripting languages like Python and R in various environments including Jupyter (notebooks), RStudio and command-line. Users have access to private file storage as well as personal SQL database space. A flexible resource access control system allows users to share their resources with collaborators, a feature that has also been very useful in classroom environments. All these services, wrapped in a layer of REST APIs, constitute a scalable collaborative data-driven science platform that is attractive to science disciplines beyond astronomy.