RAMADDA Status Report
Fall 2008

Jeff McWhirter

RAMADDA development continued (albeit at a slower pace) into the summer and Fall. Some of the highlights include:

• RAMADDA has been installed on the Unidata web site: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/repository.
• We (Jeff McWhirter and Jeff Weber) have been adding some hurricane data sets (Ike and Gustav) and products to explore and iteratively develop new features.
• RAMADDA is installed on the new motherlode server.
• The full COMET Case Study suite of data is loaded on new motherlode and RAMADDA is serving up the data.
• We plan by the end of September to have the full IDD feed harvested and available.
• A new publishing facility has been added to the IDV to enable the publishing of bundles, data and products to a RAMADDA server.
• An OpenDAP service has been integrated as well as a number of other data services.

Here are some examples of the of the end-user features provided by RAMADDA.

• Extensive use of DHTML and AJAX for end user usability.
  • Click on the folder icons here to navigate through the group hierarchy.
  • Mouse over the group and entry links to show detailed metadata in a popup.
  • On this page click on the right arrow icon next to the Entries to show a selection form.
  • View information in tabs.
  • If you were logged in and had the appropriate access you can drag and drop an entry icon onto a group to move the entry.

• Search facilities
  • Simple text search. For example, here is a search on "hurricane". Note the search results show the search criteria. You can go to the advanced search form with the icon.
  • More advanced search
  • In general we've tried to integrate search capabilities in the display context. For example, clicking on the "Created by: Jeff McWhirter" link here will search for entries created by that user. In the Metadata tab the search icon allows you to search for other entries with the same metadata.
  • You can also browse metadata.
    • Click on the icon to open a section. Click on the metadata entry to search. e.g., here is a search on the Tag "ike".
    • Click on the list icon to show an ordered list of the metadata items. The Cloud link shows a "tag cloud" representation.
• Multiple HTML views.
  • A map view.
  • A Java applet timeline.
  • A Calendar as well as a detailed Day view.
  • A Date grid/timeline.
  • A number of ways of displaying imagery including an animated image player.
  • As an interactive Graph applet.
  • Comments can be added to entries.
• Non-html views.
  • A THREDDS Catalog view. This provides http and opendap access to the data including facilities for the "latest" data.
  • An RSS feed. Note, this is the result of a search on all entries contained by the Hurricane Ike group. In general all of the available views can be applied to search results. For example here is a search for all entries that have a file ending in "nc" shown as a THREDDS Catalog.
  • An XML view for client application access.
• Data services.
  • Under the "Actions" tab here there are a number of data oriented actions. Since this entry is a grid you can subset it, returning a new netCDF file. If you were logged in you can also save the subset file back into the repository.
    You can access the grid via OpenDAP.
    You can also view a NetCDF CDL of the data.
  • Point data can be shown in a Map, as a Google Earth KML and as a CSV file for import into spreadsheets.

by Jeff McWhirter.