Improving the Accessibility of EOS Data Products for Consumption by GIS Applications

Abstract:

The content and format of ASDC data products are defined by their respective Science Teams, stretching back over the past 25 years. Many of these data models are ancient are difficult to consume with mother geospatial tools. Specifically, these tools are, in some cases, unable to read the files and/or unable to interpret properly the data organization inside them so they cannot be visualized or analyzed. This problem extends to other data products held by the various NASA data centers. A solution that can apply to all these data products across NASA data centers would be valuable.
GDAL is an open source library used by many GIS software (e.g. ArcGIS and QGIS) to access EOS data products. One possible approach to solve the interoperability problem on data access is to revise the data structure and interpretation interface from the GDAL-level. We will develop a plug-in framework based on GDAL to interpret the non-compliant data. The framework will contain data interpretation functions that are useful for solving the common problems across data products and the plug-ins (an XML file) will handle the product specific issues. With testing on multiple GIS software, we will propose a generic way to integrate the design framework into those software, ensuring the feasibility and flexibility of using our design. The framework would be an open-source package with sufficient stability and demonstration. This will allow the other data centers extend the framework and construct their own plug-ins to adjust more data products.