DatCat Workshop in San Diego
Monday through Wednesday I attended the first "DatCat Community Contribution Workshop" (or DCC1). DatCat, or the Internet Measurement Data Catalog, is an online resource for networking researchers. People can search for data to poke around in, or they can contribute their own data for others to use. The idea is that DatCat will enhance networking research because it enables reproducible research and the sharing of well-documented data. DatCat is a CAIDA project, i.e. the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.

I am sort of in charge of making our network traces available to others, so I was invited to come to DCC1. Not only was I invited, they paid for my travel and lodging! (Or, at least, they promised to reimburse me.) Anyway, the workshop went OK. I managed to submit a small portion of our data to the catalog. In doing so, I discovered that the timestamps in these data are weird, due to a known bug in the software we used to capture the traces. So, I wrote a well-documented script to fix up the metadata descriptions. I gave it to the people at CAIDA in case they can use it, so hopefully that will be useful to them.

I would really like to work for CAIDA this summer. For me, while the workshop was good and I definitely endorse the idea of the DatCat, my favorite part of the workshop was getting to know the people at the workshop. There were some really great people, both those who work for CAIDA and those who do not.