Title: NSSDC OMNIWeb: The First Space Physics WWW-based Data Browsing and
       Retrieval System
Authors: G. Jason Mathews and Syed S. Towheed, NASA/GSFC
Date: April 1995

Abstract:

The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), located at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center, provides access to a wide variety of data from NASA
spaceflight missions.  Traditionally, the NSSDC has made data available in a
variety of hard media and via on-line systems.  However, the WWW provides an
exciting new enhancement by allowing users to examine and browse the data
before retrieval.  This paper presents OMNIWeb, a WWW-based system that allows
users to produce plots and retrieve data.  The browsing and retrieving
capability was designed to aid researchers in identifying trends and to obtain
the data through an uninterrupted process.

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Title: A Comprehensive Look at CDF
Authors: Gregory W. Goucher and G. Jason Mathews, NASA/GSFC
Date: August 1994

Abstract:

The National Space Science Data Center's (NSSDC) Common Data Format (CDF) 
is a self-describing data abstraction for the storage and manipulation of
multidimensional data.  Since the CDF is designed to support any scientific 
application in a discipline-independent fashion, it is a powerful tool for the 
development of systems that can archive, manage, manipulate, display or 
analyze data.  This abstraction, which consists of a software package and a 
self-describing data structure is result of some of the NSSDC's applied 
computer science work.  CDF is internationally recognized and used by hundreds 
of users from goverment agencies, universities, and commercial organizations.  
As a result, the CDF development efforts have become a standard method for 
storing space and earth science data for a variety of applications.  In 
addition, the CDF has been critical to the success of the NASA and outside 
activities.  NSSDC has recently completed version 2.4 of CDF, which has 
enhanced performance and flexibility while being upward compatible with all 
previous versions.  Version 2.4 has the ability to operate over a wide range 
of computer platforms.  This data standard allows the integration of various 
physical science disciplines and the computational sciences enabling a 
researcher to concentrate on doing science, freeing him or her from the 
mechanism of working with specialized data structures or formats.

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Title of Thesis: Multi-Resolution Access to Remote Gridded 
Author: Hillel Dov Steinberg, University of Maryland
Date: May 1993

Abstract:

Gridded data managers are ideal for storing and manipulating scientific data. 
There are many software packages, such as CDF (Common Data Format), which can 
manage gridded data. Such packages do not provide access to remote data. This 
thesis introduces a client-server software lay er called CSCDF which can be
used in concert with the CDF library to provide applications with transparent
access to remote CDF data sets. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the
performance of CSCDF in various net work environments, and to compare this
approach with other remote access alternatives. The measurements collected
show that CSCDF introduces only a limited amount of overhead for each remote
operation, but there is an overall degradation in performance as the 
application is placed further from the server. To improve the performance
of applications built with CSCDF, a multi-resolution software library 
called MRCDF was layered on top of CSCDF to provided applications with
faster access to remote data. 
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Title: MR-CDF: Managing Multi-Resolution Scientic Data 
Author: Kenneth Salem, University of Maryland 
Date: March 1992

Abstract:

MR-CDF is a system for managing multi-resolution scientific data sets. It 
is an extension of the popular CDF (Common Data Format system). MR-CDF provides
a simple functional interface to client programs for storage and retrieval
of data. Data is stored so that low-resolution versions of the data can be
provided quickly . Higher resolutions are also available, but not as quickly. 
By managing data with MR-CDF, an application can be relieved of the low-level
details of data management, and can easily trade data resolution for 
improved access time. 

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