Member Highlight: OPeNDAP

About OPeNDAP
OPeNDAP is both the name of a non-profit organization and the commonly-used name of a protocol which the OPeNDAP organization has developed. The DAP protocol provides a discipline-neutral means of requesting and providing data across the World Wide Web. The goal is to allow people to access whatever data they require in a form they can use, all while using applications they already possess and are familiar with. In the field of oceanography, OPeNDAP has already helped the research community make significant progress toward this end. Ultimately, OPeNDAP will be a fundamental component of systems which provide machine-to-machine interoperability with semantic meaning in a highly distributed environment of heterogeneous datasets. The OPeNDAP organization exists to develop, implement, and promulgate the OPeNDAP protocol. It presents the results of its work freely to the public with the hope that it will be of service in many disciplines and facilitate sharing of and access to their data streams.

OPeNDAP Announces a Developers Workshop—at Summer ESIP—on the Application and Evolution of DAP

As part of this summer's ESIP Federation meeting, we at OPeNDAP are organizing a Developers Workshop on July 7-8 (The 2014 Developer's Meeting). Presentations are welcome on the full range of efforts related to the Data Access Protocol (DAP), with special interest in how DAP and its applications are evolving. Covered topics likely will include cloud storage, async access, semantics, and extended server functions, and invited speakers on several of these will be announced soon.

OPeNDAP and Unidata staff will offer a tutorial on DAP4, emphasizing how clients and servers may be updated to exploit its advances over DAP2. DAP4 has been developed jointly by Unidata and OPeNDAP under a grant from NOAA. The tutorial will cover both the basic protocol as described on the project page and some of the extensions, including server processing and asynchronous responses.

Please plan to attend and to share your own DAP-related work, whether your emphasis is on DAP clients or DAP servers. Previous workshops have reflected a rich array of interesting ideas and our last  Developers Meeting was seven years ago, so there should be plenty of new material!

Please submit your ideas for sessions and/or abstracts for presentations you would like to make to abstracts@opendap.org by May 15th 2014.

To attend the OPeNDAP Developer’s meeting, simply register for the ESIP meeting (opens in late April) and check the appropriate registration box. We look forward to seeing you there!

ESIP Connections

OPeNDAP joined ESIP formally only last year. However, prior to that its principals had a long association with ESIP, going back to the formation of the organization by Martha Maiden when the Distributed Oceanographic Data System (DODS) project received funding from NASA as one of the original ESIP projects.

ESIP Type: Type 2
Joined: 2013
Voting Rep: James Gallagher
Link: www.opendap.org