For well over a decade now, LOFAR ran on an aging collection of tools to specify and manage its observations and processing pipelines. These tools were written in several different languages and technologies. Each had its own model of the telescope, forcing us to do a lot of translations and communication between them. This setup greatly hampered extending the telescope model with new features, and carries an operational cost that cannot easily be lowered. In short, we were locked in.

With TMSS, the Telescope Manager & Specification System, we upgraded LOFAR's main interface to specify and manage observations and pipelines. We setup a modern Python Django + React stack, on top of a telescope model in PostgreSQL.

In this talk, we show how we combine relational and NoSQL constructs to create a robust yet extendable model for our telescope throughout the full stack, using JSON Schemas to validate specifications and even generate GUIs. How we added a high-level features such as a QA workflow between user and system, and a run-time (dynamic) scheduler of observations, based on their constraints. And finally, we touch on some of the lessons learned during development and deployment into production.