TPAC has established a distributed library of oceanographic and climate data that brings together the resources and data held by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC, the Australian Government Antarctic Division, the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research, and the University of Tasmania. The library is distributed between six agencies across Australia.

The library is built on the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) framework, which allows self describing data (such as netCDF or HDF) to be interrogated and delivered seamlessly across the web. Users are able to directly access the data using any application that has been linked with the appropriate OPeNDAP libraries. Applications include web browsers, GrADS, Ferret, Excel and common programming languages such as Matlab, C, Java and Fortran.

The TPAC digital library also hosts the WOCE Global Data Version 3.0 for distribution and provides a web-based WOCE3 Viewer search tool.

Oceans & Climate Digital Library Portal

TPAC has also developed a portal on the APAC National Grid that provides an integrated web-based user interface to its digital library data sets.

The portal provides a single point of entry to the data sets. It displays them in a common and easy to navigate format, and supports search by meta-data and file characteristics. The portal enables users to more efficiently manage their data holdings and data analysis.

The portal can be accessed at http://digitallibrary.tpac.org.au

Further information on the design and architecture of the portal is available in the following pdf document (433 KB).

Help on using the portal is available here.

Start your own digital library

Source code of the TPAC Digital Library and thee OpenDAP crawler is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpac-dlp/. Detailed documentation on how to install and run the library is also included on the website. The packages are open sourced and are released under the GPL.