This document discusses user analysis of the HDFEOS.org website and plans for future improvements. It finds that the majority of the site's 100 daily users are "quiet", not posting on forums or other interactive elements. The main user types are locators, who search for examples or data; mergers, who combine or mosaic datasets; and converters, who change file formats. The document outlines recent updates focused on these user types, like adding Python examples for subsetting and calculating latitude and longitude. It proposes future work on artificial intelligence/machine learning uses of HDF files and examples for processing HDF data in the cloud.

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HDFEOS.org User Analysis,
Updates, and Future
HDF-EOS Workshop XXIV / 2021 ESIP Summer Meeting
This work was supported by NASA/GSFC under Raytheon Technologies contract number NNG15HZ39C.
This document does not contain technology or Technical Data controlled under either the U.S. International Traffic
in Arms Regulations or the U.S. Export Administration Regulations.
H. Joe Lee
Software Engineer / The HDF Group / NASA-EED2
hyoklee@hdfgroup.org

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About HDFEOS.org
• HDF*-EOS** Tools and Information Center
• 100 users / day (Google Analytics)
• 15K entries / day (Raw web log)
– Bots
– Resources without Google tracking code
• Code
• Sample data
• 1,830 forum members
• 1~3 emails / week
*Hierarchical Data Format
**Earth Observing System

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• Users sign up for forum but don’t post.
– For viewing, no sign-up is required.
• 78 YouTube subscribers.
– Only 4 comments.
• 47 SlideShare followers
– 0 comment (7 spam comments)
• Email is still THE communication channel!
Most users are quiet.

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1. Locator
2. Merger
3. Converter
User Analysis – 3 Types

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1. Can you provide an example of X.hdf?
2. Where can I find lat/lon in X.hdf?
3. How can I subset data?
a. Filter data with a feature mask.
b. Cut data over region using
a. Latitude / longitude boundaries
b. A shape file
User Analysis – Locator

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1. How can I combine bands?
2. How can I mosaic data?
3. How can I aggregate files over time?
User Analysis – Merger

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1. How can I reproject or resample data?
2. How can I convert HDF to format X?
3. How can I open HDF with software X?
User Analysis – Converter

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• FAQ explains why we cover NASA data
products only (no ESA / JAXA product).
• MATLAB / IDL examples are updated.
– New HDF-EOS APIs return lat/lon like NCL*.
• Python examples parse StructMetadata
and use pyproj* to calculate lat/lon.
• Geo-location data products are shown
right next to the main data product.
• Subset examples are highlighted in FAQ.
Our Efforts for “Locator”
*NCAR Command Language
**Python interface to PROJ (cartographic projections and coordinate transformations library)

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• GDAL* example is updated with
gdalmdimtranslate.
• Merge examples are available in Python
and MATLAB.
• Apache Drill example is added.
Our Efforts for “Merger”
*Geospatial Data Abstraction Library

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• Python resample / reproject examples
• MATLAB / Python examples for GeoTIFF*
• MATLAB example for netCDF**
• Python example for CSV***
• NCO**** example
Our Efforts for “Converter”
* Geographic Tagged Image File Format
** Network Common Data Format
***Comma-separated values
****netCDF Operator

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• “AI*/ML**” User Type
– RGB color image creation
– HDF as input / model / output for AI/ML
• “Bigdata” User Type
– Parallel distributed processing examples
– Conversion to Bigdata formats
• “Cloud” User Type
– Add examples for HDF data in cloud
– Cost vs. Performance examples
Future Work
* Artificial Intelligence
** Machine Learning

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This work was supported by NASA/GSFC under
Raytheon Technologies contract number
NNG15HZ39C.