A tool based on IDL (Interactive Data Language) and DAP (Data Access Protocol) has been developed for user-friendly remote data access. A difficulty for many NASA re searchers using IDL is that often the data to analyze are located remotely and are too large to transfer for local analysis. Researchers have developed a protocol for accessing remote data, DAP, which is used for both SOHO and STEREO data sets. Server-side side analysis via IDL routine is available through DAP.

The tools allow normal DAP users to run IDL scripts on their data remotely via DAP. This powerful, user-friendly interface to DAP for IDL improved OPeNDAP bindings that fixed bugs in existing functionality, created a GUI client to explore data sets served with DAP, developed a pure IDL DAP implementation that provided complete DAP capabilities along with a simple installation, improved network capabilities for GDL (the open source IDL alternative) and older versions of IDL, and modified the OPeNDAP Hyrax DAP server to process data on the server-side via a syntax in the DAP request.

This work was done by Michael Galloy of Tech-X Corporation for Goddard Space Flight Center. GSC-16253-1