A shell script has been written as a means of automatically making HDF-EOS-formatted data sets available via the World Wide Web. (“HDF-EOS” and variants thereof are defined in the first of the two immediately preceding articles.) The shell script chains together some software tools developed by the Data Usability Group at Goddard Space Flight Center to perform the following actions:

  • Extract metadata in Object Definition Language (ODL) from an HDF-EOS file,
  • Convert the metadata from ODL to Extensible Markup Language (XML),
  • Reformat the XML metadata into human-readable Hypertext Markup Language (HTML),
  • Publish the HTML metadata and the original HDF-EOS file to a Web server and an Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) server computer, and
  • Reformat the XML metadata and submit the resulting file to the EOS Clearinghouse, which is a Web-based metadata clearinghouse that facilitates searching for, and exchange of, Earth-Science data.

This program was written by Richard Ullman of Goddard Space Flight Center; Bob Bane of Global Science & Technology, Inc.; and Jingli Yang of Earth Resources Technology, Inc.

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