Rich Signell asks:
> Is anyone working on a WWW FORMS interface to netCDF data? Sure,
> Mosaic's Scientific Data Brows-o-rama is nice, but it would be
> great to be able to select and extract data, and perhaps return
> selected data as ASCII as well.
There's the Ingrid package, which appears to be close to doing what you
want. More information about Ingrid is available from the URL
http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/info2www?(ingrid)
Here's a summary, excerpted from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/utilities.html#Ingrid
Ingrid
Ingrid, by M. Benno Blumenthal <benno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, is designed
to manipulate large datasets and model input/output. Given the
proper commands in its command file, it can read data from the
data catalog, a netCDF file, or a directly attached model, and
output the data, either by feeding it to a model, creating a
netCDF file, or creating plots and other representations of the
data.
Ingrid has a number of filters which allow simple data
manipulations, such as adding two datasets together, smoothing,
averaging, and regridding to a new coordinate.
Ingrid is still under development and the source code is not yet
available for public release. It currently runs only on SGI (it
uses the POINTER and STRUCTURE extensions to FORTRAN). In addition
to netCDF, it also uses HDF, NASA CDF, VOGL, and SGI GL.
Ingrid is currently running as a WWW daemon that can be accessed
through http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/datacatalog.html to see
some of its capabilities on a climate data catalog maintained by
the Climate Group of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of
Columbia University. To quote the introduction:
The Data Catalog is both a catalog and a library of datasets, i.e.
it both helps you figure out which data you want, and helps you work
with the data. The interface allows you to make plots, tables, and
files from any dataset, its subsets, or processed versions thereof.
This data server is designed to make data accessible to people using
WWW clients (viewers) and to serve as a data resource for WWW
documents. Since most documents cannot use raw data, the server is
able to deliver the data in a variety of ways: as data files (netCDF
and HDF), as tables (html), and in a variety of plots (line,
contour, color, vector) and plot formats (PostScript and gif).
Processing of the data, particularly averaging, can be requested as
well.
The Data Viewer in particular demonstrates the power of the Ingrid
daemon. ...
--
Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program
russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx P.O. Box 3000
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/ Boulder, CO 80307-3000
