Template based HDF5 satellite digital data product generation software

Satellite data is complex and voluminous and the details are essential. Managing and storing satellite data present many challenges, such as, handling huge volumes of data efficiently, managing quality, proper attribution, citation and integration of different nature of data such as images, ancillary, attitude and orbit related information. HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format) is a multi object file format for sharing scientific data in a distributed environment. This paper describes a template based approach for standardizing the process of designing and developing software for digital data products using HDF5. The idea to generate HDF product from template is inspired from XML Schema based approach for generating HDF5 products. There is no standard tool available to directly convert XML Schema to HDF5. The XMLtoHDF5 software being developed by HDF group is still in the early stage of development. After getting motivation from this approach, an ASCII based template has been defined specifically for satellite data products, also software that parses the template and generates HDF5 digital data products have been designed and developed. The design of the software and the template are explained in this paper. This approach is used for generating RESOURCESAT-2 digital data products that are voluminous in nature containing images of the scene under consideration and related ancillary information. Validity of generated product is checked by h5check utility and it is in compliance with hdf5 format.