Oceanology International

OPeNDAP Data Objects

The user requests data from OPeNDAP servers via URLs.

The URL is passed to httpd via an OPeNDAP client.

The data are returned from the server via http.

The OPeNDAP client reformats the returned data for the user's analysis package.

OPeNDAP provides three basic data objects:

data descriptor structure (.dds) syntactic metadata - rigid -- NAVO WAM Prediction in this case.
data attribute structure (.das) semantic metadata - flexible
data (.dods) - the actual data in a binary structure

In addition, OPeNDAP servers support several other services:

.ascii - an ascii representation of the data.
.info - a more readable version of the dds and das combined.
.html form - a web based form that will help to build a OPeNDAP URL.
DODS-Dir is a way of obtaining a listing of DODS files at a site.
http://pdas.navo.navy.mil/cgi-bin/nph-nc/data/WAM/