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(Source: Ullman, R.E. (July, 2001), Status and Plans for HDF-EOS, NASA's format for EOS Standard Products.)
In the early 1990s, NASA's Earth Science Data Information Systems (ESDIS) Project began to address the technological challenges involved in producing, distributing, analyzing and archiving the Earth Observing System (EOS) Standard Products. Since data interuse and inter-disciplinary science investigation are central to Earth systems science in general and particularly to the goals of EOS, NASA found that a standard data format would best facilitate data exchange and interoperability.Furthermore, the existence of a common format would encourage the development of tools for analysis that could be applied across the spectrum of data sets.
When it was determined that a common format could provide important benefits to EOS, ESDIS engaged a number of DAACs and science teams in examining and testing their data products using a variety of common scientific formats. In 1993, after careful review of more than a dozen alternatives, NASA chose the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) as the file format for EOS Standard Products. The HDF is a file format, application programming interface (API) and implementing library developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). HDF is well suited as a standard for Earth Science data. It is self describing, it is portable across many computing systems, and it is designed explicitly for scientific use with predefined structures common to scientific data. Furthermore,EOS teams have found HDF to be actively and effectively supported by NCSA, a national leader in the advancement of applications computing.
To further facilitate data sharing, certain "idioms" with respect to geo-referencing, data organization, and metadata storage are encouraged. The EOS standard use of HDF for satellite swath data, gridded data, and point data are implemented by HDF-EOS, developed by NASA under the EOSDIS Core System (ECS) contract.
Last modified: 06/02/2017