RAMADDA
Status Report: Fall 2010
Julien Chastang

Targeting of Unidata 2013 Thematic Focus Areas

RAMADDA (Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data) is a comprehensive web-based content repository, publishing platform and collaboration environment for the Earth Sciences.

RAMADDA’s mission is to enable the geosciences community to distribute and consume earth science data with little effort. These data can be easily augmented with metadata allowing straightforward search and discovery. In addition, RAMADDA is extensible via plug-ins enabling developers to meet particular user requirements and expectations by tailoring RAMADDA functionality for specific purposes. Significantly, users with relatively modest technical knowledge can stage RAMADDA servers for their own data consumption and distribution purposes.

These RAMADDA features are in alignment with several Unidata 2013 thematic focus areas.

RAMADDA meets the goal of broadening participation and expanding community services by enabling our global earth science community partners to distribute geosciences data through web-based technologies.

Self-evidently, RAMADDA targets the advancing data services by providing the geosciences public a mechanism to share and leverage earth science data. This feature is visible through user-end distribution and consumption of data as well programmatic access via RAMADDA APIs.

RAMADDA assists in the development and deployment of useful tools by providing client applications, such as the IDV, a capability to share and obtain geosciences data.

Six-Month Retrospective

RAMADDA has undergone important staffing changes with the Spring 2010 departure of Jeff McWirter and the recent arrival of Julien Chastang.  While RAMADAA development has slowed somewhat during this time of staffing change, Julien plans to carry on Jeff’s efforts and achievements by ensuring that RAMADDA continues to serve the needs of our Unidata partners and stakeholders. Specifically, Julien is collaborating with Jeff on e-support ticket requests. This interaction with the community will guide them as they set priorities for future RAMADDA development. Moreover, Jeff continues RAMADDA development and support in an unofficial capacity at his present position with UNAVCO.

Planned Activities

As RAMADDA development becomes a multi-institutional collaboration, the current plan is for development is to shift to an open source development platform such as SourceForge or GoogleCode. Julien and Jeff will move forward their collaborative effort to ensure that RAMADDA will continue to facilitate the data distribution requirements of the Unidata community.

Metrics

RAMADDA servers are running at several academic institutions. A list of RAMADDA deployment sites can be found here: http://motherlode.ucar.edu/repository/registry/list. In addition, RAMADDA downloads, mailing lists, and support statistics can be found here: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/committees/status/oct2010/metrics/ramadda.html