Re: Web FORMS interface to netCDF data?

• To: "Richard P. Signell" <rsignell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: Web FORMS interface to netCDF data?
• From: Russ Rew <russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 13:15:08 -0600

Rich Signell asks:

> Is anyone working on a WWW FORMS interface to netCDF data?  Sure,
> Mosaic's Scientific Data Brows-o-rama is nice, but it would be
> great to be able to select and extract data, and perhaps return
> selected data as ASCII as well.

There's the Ingrid package, which appears to be close to doing what you
want.  More information about Ingrid is available from the URL

    http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/info2www?(ingrid)
       
Here's a summary, excerpted from

    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/utilities.html#Ingrid

Ingrid

     Ingrid, by M. Benno Blumenthal <benno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, is designed
     to manipulate large datasets and model input/output. Given the
     proper commands in its command file, it can read data from the
     data catalog, a netCDF file, or a directly attached model, and
     output the data, either by feeding it to a model, creating a
     netCDF file, or creating plots and other representations of the
     data.
     
     Ingrid has a number of filters which allow simple data
     manipulations, such as adding two datasets together, smoothing,
     averaging, and regridding to a new coordinate.
     
     Ingrid is still under development and the source code is not yet
     available for public release. It currently runs only on SGI (it
     uses the POINTER and STRUCTURE extensions to FORTRAN). In addition
     to netCDF, it also uses HDF, NASA CDF, VOGL, and SGI GL.
     
     Ingrid is currently running as a WWW daemon that can be accessed
     through http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/datacatalog.html to see
     some of its capabilities on a climate data catalog maintained by
     the Climate Group of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of
     Columbia University. To quote the introduction:
       
     The Data Catalog is both a catalog and a library of datasets, i.e.
     it both helps you figure out which data you want, and helps you work
     with the data. The interface allows you to make plots, tables, and
     files from any dataset, its subsets, or processed versions thereof.
     
     This data server is designed to make data accessible to people using
     WWW clients (viewers) and to serve as a data resource for WWW
     documents. Since most documents cannot use raw data, the server is
     able to deliver the data in a variety of ways: as data files (netCDF
     and HDF), as tables (html), and in a variety of plots (line,
     contour, color, vector) and plot formats (PostScript and gif).
     Processing of the data, particularly averaging, can be requested as
     well.
     
     The Data Viewer in particular demonstrates the power of the Ingrid
     daemon. ...

--
Russ Rew                                                UCAR Unidata Program
russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                                          P.O. Box 3000
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/                          Boulder, CO 80307-3000

• References:
  • Web FORMS interface to netCDF data?
    • From: Richard P . Signell