TDS

The THREDDS Data Server (TDS) helps make scientific data easier to discover, access, and use. Developed as part of NSF Unidata's THREDDS project, the TDS provides a common way for organizations to publish and share real-time and archived Earth system datasets, bringing together data from a variety of sources and making it accessible to researchers, educators, and other users.

TDS can organize collections of related datasets, provide information about the data, and make data available through a range of commonly used access methods. By providing this consistent layer between data providers and data users, TDS helps simplify access to increasingly large and distributed collections of scientific data.

 

Technology at a Glance

The TDS is an open-source Java web application that runs in a web server environment. It uses the Common Data Model and NetCDF-Java library to work with a wide range of scientific data formats and provides services for discovering, accessing, and subsetting data.

TDS uses THREDDS catalogs to describe available datasets and the services through which they can be accessed. It supports several widely used data-access standards, such as OPeNDAP, OGC WCS, OGC WMS, and HTTP to combine collections of datasets into virtual datasets, allowing users to work with large or distributed collections as a whole.