umemofi is an early-stage prototype of a successor to the Multi-Epoch Data Structures (MEDS) library for multi-exposure measurement in astronomy. Its goal is to provide an abstraction layer that separates measurement algorithms from the high-level parallelization, data flow, and lower-level processing stages of a specific survey pipeline. It will also provide data structures and utility code to make implementing a umemofi backend easier.

We expect the first survey backend for umemofi to be implementd on top of the MEDS library itself, allowing an important subset of the umemofi interface to be used in production by the the Dark Energy Survey (DES) in much the same way MEDS is used there at present. Eventually the DES backend may be enhanced to support more umemofi concepts, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will provide its own backend(s), allowing the same algorithms to be run through both survey pipelines.