Developing a New Web Service for Experimental Nuclear Reaction Database (EXFOR) Using RESTful API and JSON

Abstract

Efficient data mining from the Experimental Nuclear Reaction Database (EXFOR) has a potential for utilization of modern computational analysis techniques to find trends, shortcomings and hidden patterns in the database, which in turn helps improve our knowledge of nuclear physics. To facilitate the data mining, we have developed two EXFOR parsing computer programs (EXFOR Parser) to convert the data in the database stored in the EXFOR format into the widely adopted JSON format. The converted JSON data are used for further processing to extract individual physical observables and generate tabulated data (x, y, dx, dy) where all units of measurement are standardized. Furthermore, we have developed REST APIs and an open web system for easy access and quick visualizations of these converted datasets.