The SPECCHIO Spectral Information System

Spectral Information Systems provide a framework to assemble, curate, and serve spectral data and their associated metadata. This article documents the evolution of the SPECCHIO system, devised to enable long-term usability and data-sharing of field spectroradiometer data. The new capabilities include a modern, web-based client-server architecture, a flexible metadata storage scheme for generic metadata handling, and a rich application programming interface, enabling scientists to directly access spectral data and metadata from their programming environment of choice. The SPECCHIO system source code has been moved into the open source domain to stimulate contributions from the spectroscopy community while binary distributions, including the SPECCHIO virtual machine, simplify the installation and use of the system for the end-users.