Historically, NASA Earth Observing Satellite (EOS) data products have been difficult to consume by commercial and open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. In order to make EOS data products more accessible and interpretable by GIS applications, a collaborative approach between NASA's Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC), ESRI, George Mason University (GMU), and The HDF Group has been taken. Through this activity, a framework and set of plugins have been created to be applied to the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL). This framework and its plugins serve to enable extensibility within NASA EOSDIS, leveraging NASA Earth science data across the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). Through this partnership, other DAACs can construct their own plugins necessary to enable their data products to work in applications built on GDAL, such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and Geoserver.

In this webinar, findings related to the framework and the development of GDAL plugins will be reviewed. We will also provide an overview of the GDAL framework documentation that has been generated for the purpose of guiding other agencies using Earth Observing Data (e.g. NASA DAACs, NOAA, USGEO) through the process of constructing plug-ins consistent with the framework. The certification process by which the plugins can be independently verified as properly converting the data to the format and content required for use in GIS software will also be described and demonstrated. Join us to learn more!