An astronomical wide-field Imaging system for Europe

With the new one square degree high resolution wide field imagers coming on-line in the near future, such as the 268 Mpix OmegaCAM at ESO's VST and the 360 Mpix MegaCAM at the CFHT, a new European-wide approach has been initiated to handle and disseminate the expected very large data volumes. For OmegaCAM both individual programs, including monitoring programs, and large sky survey programs are planned. Strict data taking procedures facilitate pipeline data reduction procedures both for the calibration and the science data. In turn, the strongly procedurized data handling allows European-wide federations of data-products. On-the-fly re-processing of archival data on the request of individual users with their own plugs-ins or newly derived calibrations sets are facilitated in an internationally distributed system. Compared to the classical more static wide-field image archives the newly designed system is characterized by a much more dynamical type of archiving.