0.3 Organization of this Document

This book is organized into separate sections for data providers, data consumers, and technical reference material for programmers.

Part I is for everybody who wants to use OPeNDAP.

Chapter 1 provides a high-level overview of the entire system.

Part II is for data consumers, that is, the people who want to look at data using the OPeNDAP system.

Chapter 3 shows how to look at data using OPeNDAP. It includes a section about the theoretical and practical problems of data model translation. It also explains how to build an OPeNDAP client, which is the program used to look at OPeNDAP data.

Part III is for data providers, or people who want to make their data available through OPeNDAP servers.

Chapter 5 shows how to use OPeNDAP to make your data available to others. It explains how to set up a OPeNDAP server to provide OPeNDAP data to OPeNDAP clients, and also contains information about modifying or writing an OPeNDAP server.

Part IV contains technical information about how OPeNDAP works. This information is provided to people who want to write new libraries to use OPeNDAP through a currently unsupported API.

Chapter 6 contains general information about Data and Data Models. This is important information to have for people intending to use OPeNDAP to provide data to others. It covers the OPeNDAP data attribute and data descriptor structures. The chapter also contains a section outlining the problems associated with Data Model translation.

Appendices

Appendix A contains the instructions for installing the OPeNDAP libraries, and software that requires these libraries.

Glossary A small but useful collection of terms.