The KASCADE cosmic ray data centre (KCDC)

Abstract

KCDC is a platform on the web for distributing air-shower events measured by the KASCADE and KASCADE-Grande experiments. In addition to the data, an extensive documentation on the experiments and the published observables is provided to ease the use of the data in analyses performed by the cosmic ray community. Since the experiments have been funded by tax-payers, access is also open to the broad public. Therefore, additional information and example analyses are needed and provided to enable students and pupils to get in touch with astroparticle physics. In its current release, KCDC provides access to 160 million events measured by the KASCADE array and central detector. The data set consists of 18 observables including both, reconstructed shower properties, like the number of charged particles at ground, and meta data, like when the event has been recorded. In the first year of operation nearly 100 users from more than 30 countries distributed over 5 continents logged on to the KCDC web-platform. This contribution will cover the current state of the project and the future plans for extending the published data set and the software implementation of KCDC.