dap

Implementation of the Data Access Protocol <http://opendap.org>_.

This is a Python implementation of the Data Access Protocol, a scientific protocol for data access developed by the OPeNDAP team (http://opendap.org). This implementation is developed from scratch, following the latest specification of the protocol (DAP 2.0 Draft Community Standard 2005/04/27) and based on my experience with OPeNDAP servers on the wild.

Using this module one can access hundreds of scientific datasets from Python programs, accessing data in an efficient, transparent and pythonic way. Arrays are manipulated like normal multi-dimensional arrays (like numpy.array, e.g.), with the fundamental difference that data is downloaded on-the-fly when a variable is sliced. Sequential data can be filtered on the server side before being downloaded, saving bandwith and time.

The module also implements a DAP server, allowing datasets from a multitude of formats (netCDF, Matlab, CSV, GrADS/GRIB files, SQL RDBMS) to be served on the internet. The server specifies a plugin API for supporting new data formats in an easy way. The DAP server is implemented as a WSGI application (see PEP 333), running on a variery of servers, and can be combined with WSGI middleware to support authentication, gzip compression and much more.

The latest version is available in a Subversion repository <http://pydap.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/dap#egg=dap-dev>_.