Middleware Technology Download

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Coastal Data Development Center (NCDDC) employs a "middleware" concept to provide access to internet-ready coastal data, which supplements the existing NOAA environmental data archives. "Middleware" is an electronic link between the data provider's server and the NCDDC coastal data "portal", where people can quickly bring together many types of data from many sources to answer specific questions. NCDDC builds software "gateways" between NCDDC and federal, state, and local government agencies; academic institutions; non-profit organizations, and private companies. After the data is brought to NCDDC, other middleware components can translate it into the desired representations for delivery. Together with standardized documentation, or metadata, NCDDC middleware provides a virtual database of coastal data sets. Ready access to the coastal data network supports decision-making policy, analysis of long-term change, post-event assessment, monitoring, and prediction of coastal phenomena.

The NCDDC middleware, SORaD (Spatial Object Representation and Distribution), is comprised of two components: DEI (Data Exchange Infrastructure) and IGOR (Interoperable Geospatial Object Representation). DEI is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and is used for data transport. IGOR is a Java library that is used to represent and manipulate geospatial data.

SORaD can be used to tie data and applications together across a local or wide-area network in a way that is independent of the data and application platforms, operating systems, and formats.

Data is served by servers called "gateways". These gateways wrap the data source and make the data available via the DEI interfaces using native formats, other formats via translation, and optionally the IGOR data model. A Gateway Development Kit (GDK) is provided to assist in writing gateways using Java.

Data may be accessed from gateways via any language that has a CORBA implementation available. Datasets may be transferred in any of formats supported. The use of IGOR requires the use of the Java language.

Note: this paragraph contains links to off-site locations.

The NCDDC Middleware is a library of Java modules that runs under the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 5.0. Because Java is a platform-independent language, the list of supported hardware platforms and operating systems is too large to repeat here. Please refer to this list for a complete list of supported hardware and operating systems. Note: Not shown is Mac OS X 10.4 or later, which is also compatible with the J2SE JRE.

External Dependencies: The NCDDC Middleware has no external software dependencies; however, unit tests have been developed for each middleware component which require the JUnit testing framework. It is hosted on SourceForge here.

Disclaimer: The following code and documentation was developed by the U.S. Government. It is being provided for public use "as is" without any warranties. Additionally, we are providing only the included documentation and no support.