Studying the internet’s topological structure can yield impacts across many computer science sub-disciplines, but without a simple and usable exploratory interface, the advances that can be made from this study are limited. This project will build a web interface, API, full-text search and big data processing system to encourage the study of scientific measurements of the internet.

Internet cartography--the scientific measurement, analysis, and annotation of Internet topological structure--has emerged as a new field in computer and network science. Since 2007, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) has operated Archipelago, the longest-running of several global measurement infrastructure platforms. These infrastructures continuously execute comprehensive topology mapping experiments, producing datasets that have already yielded impacts across a broad range of computer science sub-disciplines.

Yet the field is challenged by the lack of an easy-to-use and analytically powerful exploratory interface. CAIDA addresses this by developing the FANTAIL system--Facilitating Advances in Network Topology Analysis--to enable the full potential value of massive raw Internet end-to-end path measurement data sets. The proposed system will enable new research directions and increase our understanding of the Internet as critical infrastructure. FANTAIL will have four components: (1) an interactive web interface; (2) an application programming interface (API) built on web standards; (3) a full-text search system; and (4) a big-data processing system.  This project will be driven by specific community-requested use cases, use open-source components where possible, and create analysis modules that will serve as primitives for constructing more complex data-processing pipelines. Users will be more easily able to use community topology data, further accelerating the pace of scientific study of the Internet infrastructure.