OPeNDAP contains provisions for supplying documentation to users about a
server, and also about the data that server provides. When a server
receives an information request (through the info service that
invokes the usage program), it
returns to the client an HTML document created from the DAS and DDS of
the referenced data. It may also return information about the server,
and more detail about the dataset.
If you would like to provide more information about a dataset than is
contained in the DAS and DDS, simply create an HTML document (without
the <html> and <body> tags, which are supplied by the
info service), and store it in the same directory as the
dataset, with a name corresponding to the dataset filename. For
example, the datasets fnoc1.nc, fnoc2.nc, and
fnoc3.nc might be documented with a file called fnoc.html.
You may prefer to override this method of creating documentation and
simply provide a single, complete HTML document that contains general
information for the server or for a group of datasets. For example,
to force the info server to return a particular HTML document for all
its datasets, you would create a complete HTML document and give it
the name dataset.ovr, where dataset is the dataset
name.
More information about providing user information, including sample HTML files, and a complete description of the search procedure for finding the dataset documentation, is to be found in The DODS Toolkit Programmer's Guide.