Introduction

This manual is divided in two major parts: (1) a description of the INTEGRAL SPI instrument, and (2) information about the SPI data analysis tools provided by the ISDC. Further information on the instrument characterization can be found at the ISOC Announcement of Opportunity (AO) documentation pages [3]. A general overview of the analysis of INTEGRAL data can be found in the 'Introduction to the INTEGRAL Data Analysis' document [1].

For the user already familiar with the instrument characteristics, we recommend to start with the ``overview'' and ``cookbook'' in Sect.  and , respectively. These two sections should provide enough information for users of the main SPI analysis scripts, the so-called spi_science_analysis and spimodfit_analysis. The cookbook aims to to be a ``hands-on'' experience through a practical example, providing also some (limited) explanatory information. Once the cookbook example has been exercised, the reader can go to the ``Tips and Tricks'' section (Sect. ), and start its own analysis. One may come back to the ``cookbook'' and the ``Tips and Tricks'' sections when problems or difficult decisions during the analysis may appear. For the analysis of Gamma-ray bursts GRB) a dedicated script spi_grb_analysis is available, which will also be covered in the `` cookbook" part of this document.

Since the analysis of SPI data can be difficult in crowded fields or when there are variable sources in the Field-of-View (FoV), it is important that the user reads carefully the documents provided by the SPI team [11] in order to understand how these situations should be handled. Although they refer to the (spi_science_analysis) pipeline alone, the general principles are valid also for spimodfit, delivered since version 8.0 of the Off-line Scientific Analysis (OSA) package. The documents are available at http://www.isdc.unige.ch/integral/analysis.

For more expert users, who want to develop their own scripts or to execute individual programs independently, we advise to continue with Sect. , and to look at the individual program ``user manuals'' that can be downloaded from the ``Additional SPI Documentation'' web page at ISDC, http://www.isdc.unige.ch/integral/instrument/spi/doc

A thorough scientific validation of an important part of the ISDC software can be found in the paper ``The INTEGRAL spectrometer SPI: performance of point-source data analysis'' [4], which also contains a number of useful advices for the anlysis of SPI data.