The goal of Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services
(THREDDS) is to provide students, educators and researchers with coherent access
to a large collection of real-time and archived datasets from a variety of
environmental data sources at a number of distributed server sites. The THREDDS
Data Server (TDS) is a web server that provides metadata and data access for
scientific datasets, using a variety of remote data access protocols.
The THREDDS Data Server (TDS) provides catalog, metadata, and data access services for scientific data. Every TDS publishes THREDDS catalogs that advertise the datasets and services it makes available. THREDDS catalogs are XML documents that list datasets and the data access services available for the datasets. Catalogs may contain metadata to document details about the datasets. TDS configuration files provide the TDS with information about which datasets and data collections are available and what services are provided for the datasets. The available remote data access protocols include OPeNDAP, OGC WCS, OGC WMS, and HTTP. The ncISO service allows THREDDS catalogs to be translated into ISO metadata records.
The TDS also supports several dataset collection services including some sophisticated dataset aggregation capabilities. This allows the TDS to aggregate a collection of datasets into a single virtual dataset, greatly simplifying user access to that data collection.
The TDS is open source and runs inside the open source Tomcat Servlet container.
See the TDS package overview
Unidata's