A Virtual Oceanographic Data Center

Oceanographic datacenters at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are geographically sparse and disparate in their technological strengths and standardization on common Internet data formats. Virtualized search across these national assets would significantly benefit the oceans research community. To date, the lack of common software infrastructure and open APIs to access the data and descriptive metadata available at each site has precluded virtualized search. In this paper, we describe a nascent effort, called the Virtual Oceanographic Data Center, or VODC, whose goals are to overcome the challenge of virtualized search and data access across oceanographic data centers, and to provide a common and reusable capability for increasing access to large catalogs of NASA oceanographic data.