Import all OSC data

[astrofoley]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Now that the Open Supernova Catalog is offline, searching for and downloading old data is a real pain. We can upload the entire database to YSE-PZ to make things easier.

Describe the solution you'd like

We would need to (1) create entries for all old SNe and (2) import the data.

Someone will need to decide what to import. There are overlapping data in many cases. For instance, we have Swift photometry in both. This can be avoided with various flags, but for some things (like Foundation photometry), the data may be identical, and we might want to avoid clutter. Additionally, the OSC has radio and X-ray data, but YSE-PZ generally does not include those data now. It also has lots of metadata, some of which overlaps with YSE-PZ metadata (redshift) and some that does not (time of maximum) - what do we import?

We also need very clear provenance (references, DOIs, etc) and additional data quality flags. On the data quality flags, it will be important to have some generic flag about how we grabbed the data from OSC as well as thinking about its level (downloaded from website, published, etc).

Describe alternatives you've considered

You can still access OSC data through their GitHub. For instance, https://github.com/astrocatalogs/sne-1990-1999/blob/master/SN1994I.json is the SN 1994I data. But there is no easy search, no way to select on anything other than SN name, and the result is a cumbersome JSON file.

Other databases like WISERep and TNS have some of the same data, but is missing a lot.

Additional context

This is a big endeavor. One should also think about if we just want to import the old data or if we want to try to do something like what OSC did, continually updating. We do a lot of that work already, but we do not, for instance, try to get data published by other teams in YSE-PZ.

This could also be a big thing for the community. I think many people are missing OSC, and it could be a great way to get people to use YSE-PZ.