Open Cosmic Ray Data Standards

Aiming at proposing an open data standard for cosmic rays, a generic architecture for collecting data and a cosmic ray detector that meets the open data standard are presented. The proposed standard is a result of the experience of successfully established open data standards, an analysis of data related to cosmic rays already available online, and discussions with staff from the CLOUD experimental collaboration at CERN. Moreover, required fields (that every contributing detector should provide) and the option to include custom fields specific to a detector architecture or version are described. Possible host organisations for the data standard, as well as for data itself, are proposed. In this paper, a general architecture of cosmic ray detector, using scintillator plates, is presented. An FPGA based signal processing unit is described, which has two main components: signal processing from fast ADCs and precise time measuring using GPS.