Senior Project - Babel Fish

The NOAA National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) is responsible for providing various types of data to the scientific research community and the public at large. These data are received and stored in many different formats, and are sent to customers working on every platform imaginable. Software engineers at NGDC have created a set of libraries to access data in many formats based on a data description language. A GUI data browsing tool has also been written to allow users to quickly and easily view data.

A static data description language alone, however, cannot describe all of the myriad formats encountered by the Data Center. Conditional formats and complex multi-object formats are difficult or impossible to describe in a data description language. This project involved creating a data retrieval engine based on a data description language/data retrieval algorithm combination. By integrating an algorithm with a data description language, it is theoretically possible to retrieve data in any format. The project, written in Java, is highly portable and extendible.