Hi all-
The most recent VisAD release (Mon Apr 9 07:43:57 CDT 2001) contains a
new data adapter developed by Steve Emmerson of Unidata for Distributed
Oceanographic Data System (DODS) datasets. DODS is used by many in the
geoscience community to share data by providing a remote access
mechanism to those data through a DODS server. This complements the
remote data access using the Abstract Data Distribution Environment
(ADDE) access already included in VisAD.
The new adapter (visad.data.dods.DODSForm) allows you to request data
from a DODS server using the standard DODS URL data request (.dods)
syntax. Using DODSForm, DODS data types returned from the server are
adapted to VisAD Data objects. You can test this form using
visad.data.dods.DODSFormTest, which will print out a summary of the
resulting Data object structure (using visad.jmet.DumpType). The DODS
java package is now included in the VisAD release.
A description of DODS and a list of some of the available DODS datasets
can be found on the DODS homepage:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/dods
The following DODS URL can be used to access a test climatology dataset
and retrieve the Sea Surface Temperature field:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/dods/nph-nc/packages/dods/data/nc_test/COADS-climatology.nc.dods?SST
You can easily test the VisAD DODS access using this URL with
DODSFormTest, or the VisAD SpreadSheet (paste it into the formula bar),
or by using the load() function of the VisAD Python interface. New in
this latest release of VisAD, you can start the VisAD SpreadSheet using
the -jar option to java:
java -Xmx128m -jar visad.jar
Please report any problems with the DODS adapter to the visad-list.
Don Murray
