HR: 14:40h
AN: IN53C-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Towards Long-Term Archiving of NASA HDF-EOS and HDF Data - Data Maps and the Use of Mark-Up language
AU: * Duerr, R
EM: rduerr@nsidc.org
AF: National Snow and Ice Data Center, CIRES, University of Colorado at Boulder 449 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States
AU: Folk, M
EM: mfolk@hdfgroup.org
AF: The HDF Group, 1901 S. First St, Suite C-2, Campaign, IL 61820, United States
AU: Yang, M
EM: ymuqun@hdfgroup.org
AF: The HDF Group, 1901 S. First St, Suite C-2, Campaign, IL 61820, United States
AU: Lynnes, C
EM: Chris.Lynnes@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Mailstop 610.2, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Cao, P
EM: xcao@hdfgroup.org
AF: The HDF Group, 1901 S. First St, Suite C-2, Campaign, IL 61820, United States
AB: The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) has been a data format standard in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) since the 1990s. Its rich structure, platform independence, full-featured Application Programming Interface (API), and internal compression make it very useful for archiving science data and utilizing them with a rich set of software tools. However, a key drawback for long-term archiving is the complex internal byte layout of HDF files, requiring one to use the API to access HDF data. This makes the long-term readability of HDF data for a given version dependent on long-term allocation of resources to support that version. The majority of the data from NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) have been archived in HDF Version 4 (HDF4) format. To address the long-term archival issues for these data a collaborative study between The HDF Group and NASAs EOSDIS data centers is underway. One of the first activities undertaken has been an assessment of the range of HDF4 formatted data held by NASA to determine the capabilities inherent in the HDF format that have been used in practice. Based on the results of this assessment, methods for producing a map of the layout of the HDF Version 4 files held by NASA will be prototyped using a markup-language-based HDF tool to map the layout of the HDF Version 4 files. The resulting maps should allow a separate program to read the file without recourse to the HDF API. To verify this, two independent tools based solely on the map files will be developed and tested with a variety of data products archived by NASA.
DE: 0525 Data management
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting