Definitions

Cardinal Type: A data type that cannot be divided using the operators provided by DAP4. The set of Cardinal types are: Byte, Int16, Int32, Int64, their unsigned companions, Float32, Float64, String, URL. Enum (Enumerations) and Opaque.

Constructor Type: A data type used to build new structures for representing information. Constructor types gain flexibility by allowing instances of themselves to be elements in a constructed type (i.e., they support recursive definitions). The Structure, Sequence and Grid are the Constructor types in DAP.

Aggregator Type: Arrays and type-homogeneous lists are aggregator types. DAP does not contain a List data type since lists can be represented by Sequences with a single element.

Variable-size Type: A data type that does not define a fixed number of bits/bytes for its network representation. Examples of these types are Strings, Opaques and Sequences. Note that an Array or Structure containing instances of Opaque defines a variable-size type even though an Array or Structure that contains only, say, Int32 variables, defines a Fixed-size Type.

Fixed-size Type: A data type with a fixed size regardless of the value(s) contained.

Dimension: The term dimension is used in some places as a short form for Shared Dimension, defined below.

Shared Dimension: A Shared Dimension is the binding of a name to a integer. The name can then be used in place of the integer to indicate the extent of a variable with one or more dimensions. Using a Shared Dimension to describe the extent of two or more array variables describes the way that parts of the variables are related.

Independent Variable: A variable included in a data source which is manipulated during measurement or calculation. For example, a ship collecting information about sea temperature might conduct measurements at different latitude and longitudes - the variables used to hold those latitude and longitude values can be described as independent variables. The term has its origin in Mathematics and Statistics, each of which have subtly different definitions, but in the context of a data source the independent variables are often ones that might be encoded as attributes and not variables except for the fact that the values of an independent variable are often larger in volume (KB to MB) and users of the data often need to select a subset of the values, an operation that is often not supported for attributes.

Coordinate Variable: A Coordinate Variable is the binding of a Shared Dimension to a data type so that the values of an independent variable may be stored in a data source and their relation to a dependent variable made explicit. The Grid data type is used by DAP4 to define coordinate variables, which it names Maps.

Dependent Variable: A variable included in a data source which is measured or calculated as a function of independent variables. For example, if a data source held demographic information about cities' populations and median income levels, the data about income levels would be a dependent variable. As with the term independent variable, this term has its origin in Mathematics and statistics.

Data Model

DAP is evolving to meet the increasing complexity of data sources and the improving capabilities of analysis software to act as clients for various online data sources. Part of this evolution is to adopt the Common Data Model that has been developed by Unidata. Other changes are the introduction of new data types and the expansion of capabilities of the widely used 'Grid' type. The Grid type in DAP4 will allow for N-dimensional 'Maps,' multiple 'Array' components and Array components that do not use all of the Maps. Finally, some types like Array of Grid and Array of Sequence have been eliminated because they lack real use-cases and are hard to implement. By eliminating them we hope client authors will focus on complete implementations of the existing types.

The DAP 2 and DAP 4 logical data models are shown to the above, although some details, are skipped. The UML constraint shape indicates if something is an array - shape == 0 means the variable is a scalar while shape > 0 means it has one or more dimensions).

High resolution version of the DAP 2 Data Model High resolution version of the DAP 4 Data Model

Dataset

In DAP4, the Dataset object forms the root of the representation of a dataset. In DAP2, this task was split between two different objects, the DDS and DAS, which were also the names of objects used in many implementations. For DAP4, implementations could use the name Dataset. All of the information contained in the data model will be encoded in a 'Dataset response' although we might use the older name DDX in place of Dataset. In addition, some bookkeeping information might be added to the Dataset/DDX response.

The format(s) that the DAP4 responses can take on will be discussed elsewhere.

Data Types

DAP 4 will have a small increase in supported data types. All of the DAP 2 data types describe in ESE RFC 004.11 will be supported with the following exceptions:

Byte will now indicate a signed 8-bit integer data type (so that UByte can be used to name an unsigned 8-bit integer in keeping with the pattern developed for the *Int?? types).
Arrays of Grid and Sequence are explicitly excluded from DAP4.
The Grid type will have some important limitations removed.
The String type will hold character strings that comply with UTF-8.
The URL type will comply with the forthcoming IRI RFC.

DAP4 will contain new datatypes that support 64-bit integers, an Opaque type that can be used for data objects like JPEG images, a Group type that can be used to build logical collections as in NetCDF4 or HDF5 (with some limitations over HDF5's definition of Group). In addition, DAP 4 will provide for shared Dimensions and type definitions.

New Datatypes

Groups

The Dataset object must contain one or more Group objects. Like Shared Dimensions and unlike the other types, Group provides a way to form logical associations of variables. Unlike Structure, it cannot itself be used as a component in a constructor type. For example, it is not possible to have an Array of Group while it is certainly possible to have an Array of Structure.

Group characteristics:

The Group object is similar to the notion of a namespace in a programming languages.
Each Group declares a new lexical scope for names.
A Group can contain any object(s), including other Groups.
All Groups must be named.
All Groups may have shared Dimensions, which are limited in scope to the enclosing Group.
All Groups may have DAP Attributes.
At least one Group must be defined; if a dataset lacks a Group declaration, a Group called root will be defined and all of its variables will be added to that Group.
A Group cannot be used with a constructor type.
NB: This definition does not completely subsume the HDF5 Group type but is equivalent to the netCDF 4 version of it. This Group object defines a series of relationships that are purely hierarchical and not a generalized graph (as is the case with the HDF5 Group data model component). Note however, that the URL/IRI type can be used in one Group to reference variables and Dimensions (but not other Groups) defined in another Group.

Shared Dimensions

Shared dimensions (aka Dimension) will be added to DAP in the dimensions section of Group objects. Each Dimension will consist of a name and a size.

Characteristics of Dimensions:

Dimensions are not associated with a data type.
Dimensions do not have attributes.
Every Dimension has both a name and a size.
Dimensions may be used by both Grids and Arrays.
Dimensions bound to a type define Maps.
A Map is not restricted to to being a single dimension; a N-dimensional coordinate variable would use N dimensions.

How Group and Dimension differ from other parts of the data model

Both Group and Dimension are used to provide syntactic or structural metadata about a dataset. They do not contain data values themselves. In many cases these objects will not be explicitly represented in the original dataset. Instead, their existence and value(s) will be inferred based on various standards and conventions. The other elements of the data model are used to house data values or semantic metadata read from the dataset (or, in the latter case) synthesized from the values and standards/conventions that the dataset is known to follow.

Opaque

The Opaque type is use to hold objects like JPEG images and other Binary Large Object (BLOB) data that have significant internal structure which might be understood by clients (e.g., an image display program) but that would be very cumbersome to describe using DAP's built-in types. Defining a variable of type 'Opaque' does not communicate any information about its content, although an attribute could be used to do that.

A variable of type Opaque is treated as a Byte array for the purposes of transmission. This means there is no attempt to re-order four-byte words to or from network byte order and that the block of bytes is extended to fill a four-byte boundary
The size of an Opaque variable is unknown until the data are read/received
The Opaque type is a Cardinal Type, which might seem odd because instances of Opaque can be of different sizes. However, comparing similar aspects of Opaque and String indicate that they are Cardinal Types after all.
NB: Cardinal Types can appear in Group, Array, Structure, Grid and Sequence parts of the data model.

64-bit Integers

Signed and Unsigned 64-bit integers.

Enumeration

When a data source has a variable of type 'Enumeration' a DAP 4 server MUST represent that variable using a integer type, up to an including a 64-bit unsigned integer. However, in practice, these should use Byte variables when transporting the values unless an enumeration contains values too large for that type. This is true because DAP4 will use XDR to encode responses and thus Arrays of Enumerations will encode directly to single byes. If we use other types, like Int16, then they will expand to be 32-bit integers. On the other hand, a single Enumeration will expand to a 32-bit integer for encoding by XDR, but that cost is fairly small.

Changes to Existing Types

Changes to index sizes

DAP4 will support Arrays and Grids with 64-bit unsigned indexes.

Signed Bytes

Byte will be a signed 8-bit integer and UByte will be an unsigned 8-bit integer. NB: In DAP2, the Byte data type is defined as an unsigned 8-bit integer and there is no signed 8-bit integer type.

Changes to the String Type

A String is a sequence of characters encoded using UTF-8. Servers MUST translate from local encoding to UTF-8 and client must translate received string data from UTF-8 to any local representation if is not UTF-8. In DAP2, strings were simple C-sytle strings using only ASCII characters.

Changes in the Definition of Grid

While dimensions are scoped at the Group level, coordinate variables are defined at the level of a Grid object.

General information about Grid:

A Grid object is a relational type.
Each Grid object defines a lexical scope.
Each Grid has one or more Shared Dimensions that are used by its Array and Map components.
Each Grid must have one or more Maps and one or more Arrays.
Shared Dimensions provide the binding between Array (dependent) and Map (independent) values. The Map value at (i0, i1, ..., in) correlates with the Array value at the same indicial coordinates when both the Array and Map use the same shared dimensions for those indices.

Array:

Each Grid object must hold one or more Array-type variables (what is often termed a dependent variable in scientific literature).
An Array of rank N may have 1 ... N Maps

Map:

Maps (often called independent variables) must have at least one dimension and may have more than one dimension
Map objects are a restricted class of arrays; only Maps of Byte, ..., Enum are allowed.
Despite the restriction, Maps may have DAP Attributes.
Maps are required to use SharedDimension objects for all of their dimensions.

Examples:

A fairly complex Grid

This Grid has two arrays and three maps.

How the Maps and Arrays relate: For any (x,y) value of SST, the latitude and longitude that corresponds to that point can be found from the latitude and longitude MAPs using those same indices. The Grid indicates that by explicitly 'sharing the x and y dimensions with those Maps'. For the AirT array, the lat and lon of any (x,y,z) point can be found using (x,y) and the altitude of any point (x,y,z) can be found using the (x,y,z) value of the altitude Map. Again, the shared dimensions provide explicit bindings between the Array and Map values.

<Grid name="foo">
    <SharedDimension name="x" size="1024"/>
    <SharedDimension name="y" size="1024"/>
    <SharedDimension name="z" size="12"/>

    <!-- The dimensions of a Map MUST be SharedDimensions -->
    <Map name="longitude" type="Float32">
        <dimension ref="x"/>
        <dimension ref="y"/>
    </Map>

    <Map name="longitude" type="Float32">
        <dimension ref="x"/>
        <dimension ref="y"/>
    </Map>

    <Map name="altitude" type="Int32">
        <Attribute name="unit" type="String"><value>ft</value></Attribute>
        <dimension ref="x"/>
        <dimension ref="y"/>
        <dimension ref="z"/>
    </Map>

    <!-- The array SST has two dimensions (x by y) and is bound to the maps latitude and longitude.
        The maps provide values for the independent variables latitude, ...
        To find the value of an independent variable for SST at position x=a,y=b, use the indicial values
        a,b for the same (shared) dimensions in the corresponding map. -->
        
    <Byte name="SST">
        <dimension ref="x"/>
        <dimension ref="y"/>

        <map ref="latitude"/>
        <map ref="longitude"/>
    </Byte>

    <Int16 name="AirT">
        <dimension ref="x"/>
        <dimension ref="y"/>
        <dimension ref="z"/>

        <map ref="longitude">
        <map ref="latitude"/>
        <map ref="altitude"/>
    </Int16>
</Grid>

Types not Included

Discussed in this section are types that are present in some other systems (e.g., ASN 1.1) but that are not explicitly included in DAP 4. For all of these, the information they would encode should be included using attributes. This makes the information available in a way that clients can access if they choose and which people can easily understand without loading up the data model with complexity or optional features. While understanding and reading these attributes is optional for clients, it is required behaviour for conforming servers to encode this information as described here.

Date/Time

When a data source has a variable of type Date, Time or a type that combines those two, a DAP 4 server MUST represent that variable using the String type and include an attribute for that variable named DAP4_Date, DAP4_Time or DAP4_DateTime. The type of the attribute must be String and it must have only one value and that value must indicate how to interpret the date/time value(s) of the variable. As a special case, if the value is ISO-8601 then a client program can assume that the ISO 8601 standard for representation of dates and times is used.

Type definitions

We can support these two ways: DAP4 can expand the types in place (the current behavior) or; it can include a typedef (which is technically a data type synonym) and use that name throughout the remainder of the DDX.

Both HDF5 and NetCDF4 include this as a feature; it is of considerable value for an API that will be used to write data because it provides a way to make a template file with only the data type defined and then have people instantiate those types, resulting in much uniformity. For a data access system, which is read-only, there's less benefit and clients have to be more sophisticated.

DAP4 will not support type definitions (except for Enumerations and SharedDimensions). There is a down side to not supporting the feature, however, and that is that it becomes harder to faithfully represent what's in a data set.

Potential solution:

Include type definitions in an attribute section - Dataset or Group scope - and then in every Structure that represents a collection of variables with a typedef in the source, include an attribute that names the typedef. This solution frees clients from having to interpret the typedef but savvy clients can reconstruct the original information if needed.

Attributes

Attributes in DAP 4 are largely unchanged from DAP 2 with the only changes being

The addition of a new type of attribute to hold XML which is supplied for a data source using some external system.
Some new integer types (wider word sizes)
Enumerations
The addition of an optional namespace for each attribute.
Consider moving all attributes to the variable space and tagging them. This deals with How do you deal with attributes in a constrained response? because only the stuff asked for is returned when constrained.
Alternate solution to this question attributes in the constrained response: Don't return the DDX in the data response but use a multipart MIME where each part holds one variable (as defined by the Checksum feature) and prefixed with a data type declaration. The entire response could be prefixed with a xml:base href to the DDX/Dataset URL.

Note: jimg: I think we need to set a 'special' top-level container that can hold extra information that clients can use. We've wound up doing this in the past to accommodate short falls in the DAP2 spec and it seems optimistic to assume we won't ever need it with DAP4

Existing Attribute Types

The existing attribute types of DAP 2 are unchanged in DAP 4. These types are Byte, Int16, Int32, UInt16, UInt32, Float32, Float64, String and URL. Each my be either scalar or vector. Also provided by DAP 2 is a constructor type that is synonymous with Structure but is used with attributes to create groupings and lexical scopes.

Changes to the existing attribute types

String and URL attributes in DAP 4 use the UTF-8 encoding.

New Attribute Types

64-bit Integers, both signed and unsigned

Signed Byte

The Byte type will become a signed byte in DAP4 and unsigned bytes will be represented using UByte.

Enumerations

Like the integral types, this is pretty straightforward.

XML

In the DAP 3.3 schema these attributes, which are actually xsd:any elements, are not represented using <Attribute type-"OtherXML" ...> but are instead represented using a new element type called <AnyXML name="..."> since this can be described using schema 1.0. In practice these should be considered DAP attributes with a value that is the text of the XML.

The <AnyXML> element must have a name attribute. It may have any other attributes. The content is not restricted to any particular namespace and the processing is set to lax meaning that its content will be validated only if the XML elements are defined, otherwise they will not be validated.

Even though the name is klunky, OtherXML has served us well. Do we really need to change?

DAP4: Data Model

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