Wiki Testing/OPeNDAPUserGuide5-1

Documenting Your Data

OPeNDAP contains provisions for supplying documentation to users about a server, and also about the data that server provides. When a server receives an information request (through the info service that invokes the usage program), it returns to the client an HTML document created from the DAS and DDS of the referenced data. It may also return information about the server, and more detail about the dataset.

If you would like to provide more information about a dataset than is contained in the DAS and DDS, simply create an HTML document (without the html and body tags, which are supplied by the info service), and store it in the same directory as the dataset, with a name corresponding to the dataset filename. For example, the datasets fnoc1.nc, fnoc2.nc, and fnoc3.nc might be documented with a file called fnoc.html.

You may prefer to override this method of creating documentation and simply provide a single, complete HTML document that contains general information for the server or for a group of datasets. For example, to force the info server to return a particular HTML document for all its datasets, you would create a complete HTML document and give it the name dataset .ovr, where dataset is the dataset name.

More information about providing user information, including sample HTML files, and a complete description of the search procedure for finding the dataset documentation, is to be found in The OPeNDAP Programmer's Guide.