NICE: A Web-Based Tool for the Characterization of Transient Noise in Gravitational Wave Detectors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Paper summary

The paper proposes NICE - Noise Interactive Catalogue Explorer - is a web tool developed for rapid glitch analysis in gravitational-wave data. It relies on a multi-database structure and features an API for the selection of glitch metadata of interest for further analysis. The novelty introduced by NICE is the interactive infrastructure focused on glitch instrumental and environmental origin investigation, which is based on class labels determined by their time-frequency morphology.

2. Strengths

• The paper proposes a web interface with a back-end database containing the glitch information found by ETGs which can solve an important problem.

• The writing of the paper is generally good and easy to follow.

3. Weaknesses

• The paper doesn’t discuss the limitations in the Threats To Validity section.

• There is no evaluation experiment to compare the performance of NICE with other existing tools.

4. Comments for authors

1. Significance

1. The paper may also want to introduce why to choose this type of database.

2. Authors may want to add the statistical significance test in the experiments.

2. Soundness

1. There is no evaluation experiment to compare the performance of NICE with other existing tools.

2. There can be other algorithms such as machine learning algorithms that may also work, authors may want to discuss and compare them.

3. There can be a related work section.

3. Novelty

1. The paper is the first work to use the interactive infrastructure focused on glitch instrumental and environmental origin investigation.

4. Presentation

1. Authors may want to add a section on Threats To Validity to discuss the limitations of the paper and how the authors managed to overcome the restrictions.

5. Verifiability

1. The paper doesn’t discuss much to enhance its verifiability. The tool will be integrated with other platforms.

6. Some minor comments

1. All figures in the paper are not vector graphics.

Line 154: example -> examples

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Referee report for "NICE: a web-based tool for the characterization of transient noise in gravitational wave detectors"

The paper describes a web-based tool that automates investigation of anomalies in gravitational wave detector data. Understanding problems in the data is crucial for gravitational wave studies, which must contend with many sources of technological contamination. It is even more important to be able to see and analyse glitches during commissioning so that sources of contamination can be reduced or eliminated.

The paper describes high-level tool architecture and user interface.

The referee recommends paper for publication.

Author Response

Reviewer 3 Report

The NICE tool offers interactive graphical features for analyzing noise in gravitational wave detectors. Its multi-database structure and API facilitate the selection of glitch metadata for detailed analysis. A notable innovation of NICE is its interactive infrastructure, which enables investigation into the instrumental and environmental origins of glitches based on their time-frequency morphology class labels.

The abstract should be a little more detailed and clear with professional terminology (domain, not software). Also, the introductory section starts right away with professional terms and unknown detectors (it makes more sense to describe them first and then list them by years when, and what happened). Revision of the introduction is requested, first a more general story, then going into details. Only from figure 1 did O2, O3a,..., mentioned in the first paragraph become clear.

The work after the introduction lacks a separate "Related work" section with a description of existing systems and tools in this domain/research field. There are already implemented tools that deal with this topic, but they are not mentioned in the paper, nor described in more detail. It should be pointed out what are the main disadvantages of such tools, and what was the motivation to start developing a new tool.

The "Software Description" section should be divided into two separate sections: (*) Description of the technical specification and architecture of the tool (this part is written a little superficially, with a lot of incorrect information: the main part of the system is databases!? the technologies used are not sufficiently described, as nor communication between system components, reading data from databases, etc.).

The other section, separated by (*), I call "Description of the tool's operation" - will include a description of the components and graphs that you have shown and implemented functionalities.

Figure 2 needs to be described in more detail, as this is neither a component/communication diagram nor a representation of the complete system architecture. I would even suggest using the UML standard for such an engineering tool. The technology stack in the manuscripts that are based on the software tool must be much better presented.

Section 4 is correct and Section 5 should be renamed to "Conclusion". Also, this section needs to be supplemented. The conclusion should usually answer the following questions:

1) What have other researchers done in developing similar tools?

2) What did the authors achieve better than other tools?

3) What are the directions for further development of the tool and possible upgrades?

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

In paper Authors discuss a software tool for rapid glitch analysis in gravitational-wave data. Important assumption of developed software is providing support to detection noise activities. Authors also provide interactive infrastructure for “glitch” analysis and software is planned to integrate with Virgo, Advanced LIGO and KAGRA characterization pipelines what also means that proposed solution can be characterized as mature solution.

General information about tool is provided at section 2 with brief discussion about available functionalities. Detection of “glitches” is shown in section 3. The source code of tool is also available at GitHub repository. In general paper shows main results and Strengths of the developed software. The general structure of paper is clear, and functionalities are shown by the examples given at section 2.

Therefore, in my opinion paper can be accepted to publication in current form.

Author Response

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank the authors for fixing some of the comments. Given that it is not practical to evaluate the tool in a quantitive way, is that possible to collect ideas of users?

Author Response

Thank the authors for fixing some of the comments. Given that it is not practical to evaluate the tool in a quantitive way, is that possible to collect ideas of users?

Thank you for this question. We have collected a list of potential use cases. In Section 3, in particular, the SGAW tool provides a way to view the morphology of glitches not yet classified, so in perspective it is possible to collect ideas on the possible classifications of these objects. I emphasized this peculiarity in Section 3 with this sentence:

“The Q-transform done on the strain data channel also helps scientists identify glitches that have a particular time-frequency morphology but do not have a classification label yet (see Figure 5). This makes the SGAW tool a good collector of ideas for the possible classifications of these glitches.”

Reviewer 3 Report

All my suggestions have been accepted and I have no complaints.

Another detailed reading of the paper and correction of small corrections in English is needed.

Author Response

Another detailed reading of the paper and correction of small corrections in English is needed.

Thank you very much for your careful reading. We have corrected other typos and fixed the descriptions of chapters as written in the introduction, to make them consistent with the current version of the draft. These corrections have been marked in blue in the new manuscript draft.