Data Transport within the Distributed Oceanographic Data System
James Joseph Gallagher, George Milkowski · 1995
The Distributed Oceanographic Data System (DODS) is a client-server system which enables existing data analysis programs to be transformed from software, which is limited to accessing local data, to clients, which can access data from any of a large number of data servers. This is done without requiring modification to the existing software's source code by reimplementing the data access API libraries used by those programs. Once a given API library is modified to read from a DODS data server, any program which uses that library as its sole means of accessing data can be relinked with the new implementation and can function as a client within DODS. Data servers which can be accessed by these clients are built using filter programs and one or more httpd Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs. Data sets made available are thus accessible via URLs. While the data servers' principal function is to provide the client programs with values from the data sets, they also make available, as text, information about the variables in the data set and their data types. This information can be accessed by any WWW browser.