A cooperative data management scheme for AUV

Recent use of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) technology allows high-resolution 3D oceanographic data sets to be collected synoptically or pseudo-synoptically. In order for scientists and researchers to share and study such data effectively its management should be done on a cooperative basis so that finite resources can be better leveraged. This paper addresses this issue and proposes the use of hierarchical data format (HDF) as a standard format upon which AUV data can be exchanged. makeHDF and gridHDF, which convert an ASCII data format to HDF format and grid-based HDF format respectively, have been developed. Once the conversion is complete, a wide variety of public or commercial software can be used to visualize and analyze the data. Information on public domain software that supports HDF is included