For several years the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) office of Environmental Services Data and Information Management (ESDIM) has been operating a Web-based data search and retrieval system called NOAAServer.(1) The NOAAServer system, currently in production use, allows users to search for data via keywords and to explore the results of the search using data browsing facilities provided locally by the participating nodes. NOAAServer Version 2 allows users to plot data from two or more participating nodes in the same set of axes. The plots are created via a Java client at the user's desktop. The Java client communicates with the participating nodes via CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).
CORBA is one of many competing methods by which objects can transparently make requests and receive responses. The current effort of the NOAAServer development team centers on the construction of a portable CORBA-based server that can be easily installed at any participating site. The results of our efforts at the NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center to install and operate the NOAAServer Version 2 CORBA-based server are reported here.
In addition to discussing the specifics of the server architecture developed by the NOAAServer team, we explore the pros and cons of using CORBA as the basis for a system to distribute objects in the area of earth sciences. Communicating earth science data via CORBA requires the encapsulation of complicated data models into the CORBA framework. How this is done also affects the user interface design and what information is available to users when they are making choices about what data to explore. We also evaluate the successes and failures of the NOAAServer team's attempt to create a CORBA-based server that is both general and portable.
(1) Daddio, Ernest and A.W. Brazille 1998: NOAAServer Project: Integrating NOAA Data and Information Services on the Web, Preprints, Fourteenth International Conference on Interactive Information and Processing Systems for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology, Phoenix, AZ., AMS, 186-190