What is Webification?

Webification (w10n) is an enabling technology that simplifies use of data on the web platform. It has been successfully applied to large and complex science data, such as ones archived by NASA Planetary Data System (PDS).

W10n abstracts an arbitrary data store as a tree, in which two types of entities exist: node and leaf. A node can contain sub-nodes and leaves. A leaf holds data and is terminal. Both node and leaf can have attributes.

W10n uses meaningful URLs to locate inner components of a data store and make them directly accessible via HTTP/HTTPS in ReSTful way. A w10n URL has a form as follows

		    http://host:port/some_path/webifiable_store/identifier?queryString

String /identifier identifies

either meta info of a node or leaf by ending with a forward slash '/', e.g., /0/raster/

or data info of a leaf by ending with an enclosing square-bracket pair '[...]', e.g., /0/raster/data[0:20:2,30:40:4,0:1]

String ?queryString indicates how the access should be done, such as, in what output format data of a leaf should be returned.

What are webified?

Directories

All directories are webified.

When a directory is webified, its sub-directories become w10n nodes and files become w10n leaves.

By default, meta info, i.e., content of a dir is displayed in HTML,

/w10n/

To have it in json, specify query parameter as ?output=json, e.g.,

/w10n/?output=json

Furthermore, one can use glob pattern in URLs to filter the content, e.g.,

/w10n/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_2015/data/1506[12]*/
/w10n/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_2015/data/1506[12]*/W*.IMG/

To have the response returned in JSON, specify query parameter as ?output=json, e.g.,

/w10n/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_2015/data/1506[12]*/?output=json
/w10n/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_2015/data/1506[12]*/W*.IMG/?output=json

Data Files

VICAR/PDS and common image files such as GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, etc. are webified.

By default, meta info is returned in JSON format.

Take this VICAR file (a Cassini close-in of Saturn's tumbling moon Hyperion) as an example:

http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG

Its attributes and data arrays can be accessed using w10n URLs as follows,

http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/: returns top meta info in JSON, which contains global attributes and a list of available images. In this case, there is only one image named as 0.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/?output=html: returns the same top meta info as above, but in HTML.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/: returns meta info of image 0 in JSON. One attribute metadata contains VICAR labels.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/image[]?output=gif: returns image 0 in GIF format.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/image[(64,128)512x256]?output=gif: returns image 0 cropped at pixel location (64,128) with size equal to 512×256.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/resized/128x64[]?output=gif: returns image 0 resized to width 128 and height 64.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/resized/w128[]?output=gif: returns image 0 resized to width 128, aspect ratio unchanged.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/resized/h64[]?output=gif: returns image 0 resized to height 64, aspect ratio unchanged.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/raster/data[]?output=json: returns image 0 raster data array in JSON. Or in big/little-endian binary if output is set to big-endian or little-endian.
http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/0/raster/data[0:15,0:10,0:1]?output=json: returns a slice of image 0 raster data array in JSON.

Clients

The HTML view provided by ?output=html is a human-friendly browsable interface, which presents URLs above on web pages that one can interact with, e.g.,

http://.../N1506378403_1.IMG/?output=html

This interface is available to every webified file and is accessible through a folder icon

at the rightest column called "webifiable" on each directory listing page, such as

/w10n/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_2015/data/1506288646_1506388236/

Web-based Visualization

The most interesting and powerful examples of webified data come from the brave new world of HTML5. Please visit http://webviz.jpl.nasa.gov to see how webified data can be used on the web platform. Some examples there require webGL for 3D visualization. Please use Google Chrome or Apple Safari browsers for better user experience.

FAQs

TBD