[RFC-004]Comment-14

Organization: Space Science and Engineering Center

I want to encourage NASA to adopt the proposed DAP2 protocol and encouraging its use to make all NASA products available via OpenDAP servers.

For several months now, we have been using OpenDAP to access MODIS and AIRS data from the Goddard DAAC while developing research tools for hyperspectral data. This has proven to be very effective in allowing applications to fetch only the portions of the data (cubes) that are needed at any given moment. Laptop users also find that it is often faster reading data from the DAAC via OpenDAP than reading a local HDF file.

Making all NASA's data available via OpenDAP is important to the academic and research communities for a variety of reasons:

• the the OpenDAP servers, this would provide a unified API for client software access to data remotely.
• the atmospheric science community, through the Unidata program at UCAR/NCAR, is developing new applications that already use OpenDAP to access remote data.
• furthermore, this will help aleviate the time and resources that are wasted adapting client software and scripts to a variety of APIs (some of which, like HDF4 and HDF5 are too obscure to be understood by moderately literate scientists).
• this also allows for higher level catalogs of data holdings (like THREDDS) to be used, which further enables client applications to more redilly locate data holdings.
• it encourages users to only get the data subsets that they need, rather than ftp-ing huge data files from which only a small portion of data are actually extracted.
• finally, doing this would demonstrate to the academic and research communities that NASA clearly wants them to be using their data. The installation at the Goddard DAAC is an excellent first step, and I am very pleased to see NASA considering a more formal recognition (and use) of this protocol.