Tuesday, 11 February 2003
Visualizing digital library data resources with Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer
Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is a freely available Java™-based tool that can be used for analysis and visualization of multidimensional geoscience data sets. The IDV allows users to interactively slice, dice and probe these data sets. Digital libraries are indexing references to Earth System data resources, including real-time and archived data sets. Through the framework developed by the NSDL-funded Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) project, the IDV can access and display these data resources. Just as the World Wide Web and digital-library technologies have simplified the process of publishing and accessing multimedia documents, THREDDS provides the needed infrastructure for publishing and accessing scientific data in a similarly convenient fashion. THREDDS embodies a network of thematic servers providing educators and students coherent access to a large collection of data (data web). At the heart of the THREDDS framework are metadata catalogs that are used by data providers to describe and publish their datasets. These catalogs provide discovery and usage metadata and can be indexed by a digital library like the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Using the metadata catalogs, the IDV provides users with options of selecting entire data sets, or just small subsets of data. The integrated nature of the IDV allows users to bring in data from multiple servers through a variety of protocols and combine them into a single display. It provides a powerful mechanism for using real-time and historical data in a classroom setting.
Supplementary URL: http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/software/metapps