CIA, the ISOCAM Interactive Analysis system, was jointly developed by the ESA Astrophysics Division and the ISOCAM Consortium as the tool adapted to ISOCAM's particular scientific and engineering data processing requirements.
During the operational phase of ISO, CIA's main operational use by the CAM teams (located at the ISO operations centre at Villafranca del Castillo, Spain and the ISOCAM data centres at Saclay and Orsay, France) was to calibrate ISOCAM, assess the quality of ISOCAM data products, monitor the health of ISOCAM and to provide a test-bed for algorithmic developments.
More interesting for the general observer, however, are CIA's functionalities as an astronomical data processing system. CIA has now acquired a wealth of astronomical data processing and display routines. These enable users to improve upon the result of the automatic processing performed by the pipeline by selecting algorithms best suited for their data.
CIA is supported for VMS/Alpha and Sun/Solaris, and is known to run under DEC Unix, HP/UX and PC/Linux. CIA is mainly IDL based, but contains C++ modules for time-consuming processes.
Basically, its functionality can be grouped as follows:
CIA is released with an User's Manual, which describes the functionalities and includes worked examples, and various technical reports.
CIA is available to the astronomical community upon request. For questions and comments on CIA contact the ISO helpdesk.