John Gipson
Type of contribution: invited
Session: 3

Report of IVS Working 4: Proposed VLBI Data Format

John Gipson, NVI, Inc/NASA GSFC

I present an overview of the "openDB format" for storing, archiving, and processing VLBI data. In this scheme, most VLBI data is stored in NetCDF files. NetCDF has the advantage that there are interfaces to most common computer languages including Fortran, Fortran-90, C, C++, Perl, etc, and the most common operating systems including linux, Windows and Mac. The data files for a particular session are organized by special ASCII "wrapper" files which contain pointers to the data files. This allows great flexibility in the processing and analysis of VLBI data. For example it allows you to easily change subsets of the data used in the analysis such as troposphere modeling, ionospheric calibration, and editing and ambiguity resolution. It also allows for extending the types of data used, e.g., source maps. I present a roadmap to transition to this new format. The new format is already in use by several analysis packages. This new format can now be used by various analysis packages.