Remote access to Earth science data by content, space, and time

Abstract

For the past several years a small team of developers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at the University of Rhode Island have been working on a system to provide Earth scientists with access to remotely held data sets stored in various standard formats as though the data were local to the user's application. This capability requires not only interoperability among multiple formats and remote access to data via the Internet, but also the ability to identify and select small subsets of data by space, time, and measured parameter. This demo presents the combination of an http-based client/server application that facilitates Internet access to Earth science data coupled with a Java applet GUI that allows the user to graphically select data based on spatial and temporal coverage plots and scientific parameters. Access to data by values of the measured parameters is feasible via the same indexing schemes used for space and time, and work to include this capability is in progress.