GWOSC+

The Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC) provides access to data, software tools, and tutorials, enabling users to explore and analyze events detected by the network of gravitational wave observatories.

The GWOSC+ tool provides simplified and unified access to official gravitational-wave transient catalog (GWTC) data products and is designed to support a broad community, from newcomers to multi-messenger and experienced gravitational-wave analysts.

The service has been integrated into several complementary platforms, including ACME platforms such as MMODA, thereby reaching a wide and diverse multi-messenger user base and supporting usage scenarios ranging from graphical interfaces to Jupyter notebooks, Docker images, and command-line execution. The core functionalities of the tool are organized into four complementary modules:

  • Skymap search module: This module enables sky-localization queries based on right ascension and declination coordinates. It allows users to retrieve and visualize credible-region skymaps associated with gravitational-wave events, supporting source localization and follow-up studies.
  • Event selection module: This component provides flexible event discovery capabilities, allowing users to search GWTC events by name, observation date, and key source properties. It facilitates targeted exploration of specific events or subsets of the catalog.
  • Catalog statistics module: The statistics module offers high-level visualization and analysis of GWTC data. It includes tools to examine detector network participation, distributions of source parameters, and credible-area statistics, enabling population-level and comparative studies.
  • Parameter estimation module: This module focuses on detailed analysis of parameter-estimation results. It provides access to posterior samples and enables visualization of strain data compared with waveform models, supporting in-depth interpretation of gravitational-wave signals.

A collection of Jupyter notebooks implementing these modules is available on the Renkulab platform. The notebooks demonstrate practical use cases based on widely adopted gravitational-wave libraries such as gwosc, GWpy, ligo.skymap, and pesummary, and are intended to support the multi-messenger astronomy community.

An easy-to-use graphical service named LIGO–VIRGO–KAGRA has been published on the MMODA platform. This GUI-based service is directly derived from the Renkulab notebooks and provides equivalent functionality through a fully graphical, user-friendly interface.

The underlying Python package, gwtc_analysis, is distributed through multiple channels (Anaconda, PyPI). A conda-forge package is currently in the final stages of publication, with the recipe fully tested and all continuous-integration checks successfully completed. To facilitate deployment and reproducibility, a Docker image named gwtc-tool is available on DockerHub. A similar user-friendly service based on this Docker image is currently being prepared for release on the Galaxy platform.

The development of gwtc_analysis is hosted on GitHub. GWTC parameter-estimation HDF files and skymap FITS files products are transparently retrieved by the tool using multiple backends, including:

Link to GWOSC website