Motivation for DEAP

• DEAP is a modular package for the interactive display and editing of scientific data with the goal of producing publication quality plots.
• Radio astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) need a generic data display and analysis toolkit that provides a versatile mechanism for viewing and interpreting their observation data.
• The process of turning raw data into publishable science is an interactive, highly iterative process of viewing the data in detail, editing it (data flagging), and analyzing it (data fitting).
• There are no existing tools that accommodate data viewing, data flagging, data fitting, and interative graphical data editing within the same application. However, there are many tools that perform a subset of these functions very well.
• All assumptions regarding the nature of the data entered into the program were kept at a minimum. This means that DEAP is intended to be useful for viewing, flagging, and fitting many types of data, not just astronomical data.