THREDDS (THEMATIC REAL-TIME ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRIBUTED DATA SERVICES): INTEGRATING ENVIRONMENTAL DATA AND ANALYSIS TOOLS INTO DIGITAL LIBRARIES

THREDDS is part of the USA National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative of the National Science Foundation.

Data collections are a cornerstone of environmental research and education. Recent parallel progress in the worlds of scientific data management and education-oriented digital libraries has highlighted a common need to discover widely distributed data sets, and to use unfamiliar data meaningfully with a comprehensive set of analysis tools for: - Visualizing complex, multidimensional data - Integrating and overlaying data from multiple sources - Gracefully handling coordinate systems, measurable quantities, units of measure, and sampling variations.

To address this issue, we are building a prototype scientific data web that will facilitate the publication, discovery, and use of environmental data, just as the World Wide Web has made the publication of and access to textual and multimedia documents simple and straightforward. The goal of this work is to expand the means by which learners -- including students, educators, scientists, and the general public -- can use these vast resources to perform their own inquiries. This is being achieved by providing coherent access to a large collection of real-time and archived data sets from a variety of environmental data sources at a number of distributed server sites. The data sets will be conveniently accessible from a wide variety of THREDDS-enabled data analysis and display tools.

The heart of THREDDS is metadata contained in publishable inventories and catalogs. The creation, publication, and distribution of data catalog information will be facilitated by the discovery system and services provided by DLESE (the Digital Library for Earth System Education). For example, sites receiving real-time environmental data use THREDDS tools to create inventory catalogs automatically. On the other hand, since the catalogs do not have to reside on the server with the data, researchers and educators can incorporate tailored catalogs of illustrative datasets into publications and educational modules that also include tools for data analysis and visualization.

This presentation and demonstration provides an overview of THREDDS, an update on the current status, and a glimpse of future directions.