Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
developed code to convert between file formats such as NetCDF and GRIB
and BUFR.
Data management and exchange in the BLUElink
>
project involves sev-
eral emerging standards. This has involved significant development of new
systems, including the integration of the back-end database with available
OPeNDAP servers. The push to standardisation is often hard to justify in
the course of a single project, and can seem like more risk than reward. The
advantage of enabling these standards, however, rather than relying on tech-
nologies such as FTP, is that it enables data sharing in a highly automated
fashion. Just as XML and machine-independent data standards are becom-
ing increasingly popular in business, so scientific standards will become
increasingly popular in institutions. OPeNDAP, an openly published data
exchange specification, allows tighter integration between heterogeneous
applications, ultimately reducing the effort of end users and application
developers in accepting new data sources. Putting in the additional effort
to use open technologies will encourage faster take-up across the commu-
nity, allowing smaller projects to achieve high-level goals faster. OPeNDAP
has the advantage of being highly scalable. Its ability to subselect data on
the server side allows data providers to reduce bandwidth by sending only
the data which is requested by the client. Highly flexible, OPeNDAP servers
can be used to both aggregate external data sources into a single format,
easing the task of integrating new data into existing applications, or as a
universal publishing mechanism. The ability to abstract away the problem
of data exchange is a powerful enabler of new technologies.
4. Conclusion
The objective of BLUElink
>
is to produce the first operational forecasts
of mesoscale ocean circulation for the Australian region. BLUElink
>
is
halfway through the four-year contract period and will transition in focus
from research and development to operational trials in 2006. The scale of the
problem being undertaken is at the high-end of high performance comput-
ing and data management and will continue to pose interesting challenges
to the Bureau. The development of this system has been constrained in its
design to deliver the capability within the project period. There are numer-
ous areas that have been identified for further development in a potential
follow-on project and detailed analyses of the performance will offer addi-
tional insight. The scale of the analysis problem ensures that full use must
