A scientist wishing to examine and sample some dataset will typically be comfortable using a relatively small number of data analysis and display programs or packages. Some of these packages will use one of the popular data access APIs currently available. However, few data access APIs provide direct access to distributed data 1, so this access must be made with network tools, such as web browsers or ftp. While relatively straightforward in principle, this process can nonetheless become time-consuming and somewhat challenging in practice.
The following example illustrates some of the differences between accessing distributed data with the tools currently in widespread use, and the same operation using OPeNDAP.