lotus

no previous pagepage up: Scientific Data Format Information FAQ
  
next page: 02  How to get a current copy of this document (Scientific Data Format Information FAQ)

01 How to use this document (Scientific Data Format Information FAQ)




Description

This article is from the Scientific Data Format Information FAQ, by Ilana Stern ilana@kiowa.scd.ucar.edu with numerous contributions by others.

01 How to use this document (Scientific Data Format Information FAQ)

Most FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) documents list many questions and
their answers. This FAQ is (mostly) devoted to answering only one question:

"Where can I find documentation and software for [X] data format?"

As the amount of information available over the networks has been
increasing, so have the methods by which this information can be obtained.
No longer is direct usage of FTP the only, or even the most frequent, method
of obtaining data; we now have Gopher, Wais, and WWW, as well as many
site-specific interfaces. Because the information itself may be accessible
in many different ways, this FAQ will identify resources in terms of
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). This will also help us convert this
FAQ to a hypertext document, so that it can be used with a WWW browser
to go directly to any of the listed sources.

Here's a glossary, so you can decode the URLs if necessary to reach
the sites:

<URL:ftp://host.name.domain/[directory/[filename]]> ftp site
<URL:http://host.name.domain/[directory/[filename]]> www server
<URL:telnet://host.name.domain> telnet site
<URL:gopher://host.name.domain/[directory/[filename]]> gopher server
<URL:wais://host.name.domain> wais server
<URL:news:newsgroup.name> newsgroup

So, for example, if a document is available at ftp://ncardata.ucar.edu/
it means that you should ftp to ncardata.ucar.edu, and the information is
in the top-level directory.

If you don't know what these information retrieval methods are, see
the section "How to use the data retrieval methods".

 

Continue to:













TOP
no previous pagepage up: Scientific Data Format Information FAQ
  
next page: 02  How to get a current copy of this document (Scientific Data Format Information FAQ)