Rosetta - Unidata's Web-based Data Translation Tool: Progress and Future Plans

Rosetta is a web-based data transformation service aimed at facilitating the use of standard data formats to enhance data reuse and interoperability within and across scientific domains. Standard data formats allow data providers, such as community data portals, to disseminate data and their associated metadata in ways that the typical FTP site could never achieve - for example spatial, temporal, and variable-space subsetting, aggregation of multiple files, and some very basic data transformations. Standard data and metadata schemes make data easier to use when accessed from appropriately enabled data servers. Unfortunately, these formats have a steep learning curve, and are somewhat prohibitive for data providers, such as scientist in the field, to create them from native data formats (for example, ascii based data files from dataloggers).

This talk will highlight progress made over the past year, including updates to the ASCII data transformation wizard interface, the addition of a web API for automated data transformation, and newly supported data input and output types, including near future additions such as the hydrological communities WaterML format. Progress on the ACADIS polar data translation efforts will also be discussed. Special focus will be given to the open source nature of the project, and how community members can collaborate with Unidata on Rosetta's future development.