CDF Embraces XML

The CDF office realizes that scientific progress is often impeded by the lack of, or excessive multiplicity of, available standards for data formats and structures and/or data format translators. In a bid to facilitate and promote data sharing with other data formats, the CDF office has decided to adopt Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for establishing interoperability with other scientific data formats. XML is a language defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and it is an emerging technology for describing digital information. XML is a method for putting structured data in a text file, and it is gaining support from a wide spectrum of users including academia, various government organizations, various technical committees, and commercial software companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.

The CDF office has developed an XML-based markup language called CDF Markup Language (CDFML) to describe CDF data and metadata (see its DTD and schema here) and created the following two utilities in Java:

CDF2CDFML - dumps the contents of a CDF file into a XML file that conforms to the CDF DTD or CDF schema.
CDFML2CDF - creates a CDF file from a XML file that conforms to the CDF DTD or CDF schema.

These utilities are available from the FTP site ( http://nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov/standards/cdf/dist/cdf27) where the CDF library is available.