DIAL Access to Distributed Digital Earth Remote Sensing Data

摘要

Data and Information Access Link (DIAL) is a Web client-server based data and information system for ingesting, documenting, managing, and distributing digital Earth remote sensing data over the Internet. While powerful, it is compact, easy to set up and use, and has minimal computer power and maintenance requirements. It permits data producers to set up a server rapidly on their desktops, making data available via the Internet. The system provides both catalog and data services to data users through web browsers. The catalog services permit data users to search data archives at directory and inventory levels with spatial, temporal, and parameter criteria. The data services allow users to interactively browse, animate, plot, subset, subsample, reformat, and download the selected data. The system is also designed to interoperate at both catalog and data object levels, allowing one DIAL site to interoperate with other DIAL sites or other data systems by using interoperability protocols such as NASA V0 IMS and CEOS CIP. The interoperability of DIAL allows formation of a federation of data providers, enabling users to find and access distributed digital Earth archives in the federation by searching only one of the federated sites. The DIAL system has been developed and is available for major UNIX and Windows 95/NT platforms. Several national and international research programs have selected DIAL as their distributed data and information system. The DIAL software can be downloaded at no cost from http://dial.gsfc.nasa.gov