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This page contains links to third-party tools and utilities that use HDF, but which have not been updated in many years.

Archived Tools related to Earth Science

See Archived HDF Tools Related to Earth Sciences for a list of HDF software related to Earth Sciences that has not been updated recently.

Other HDF Software That Has Been Archived

Contributed Software
This is software contributed by HDF users, which is available from the HDF Group FTP server.

FreeForm
This application provides a flexible method for specifying data formats to facilitate data access, management, and use. It was developed at the National Geophysical Data Center, NGDC.

h5utils (h5fromh4)
The h5utils package contains utilities for HDF5 visualization. Among the utilities is the h5fromh4 utility for converting single-dataset HDF(4) files into HDF5 files.

hdfgen.pl
The hdfgen.pl perl script parses a C data structure from an input file (a .h file) to produce a set of C subroutines that will initialize a Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) file, and read/write data into/from the input C data structure. The purpose of hdfgen.pl is to automate many of the steps required to write C programs which read/write HDF data files. Using hdfgen.pl, the user needs only minimal knowledge of low-level HDF functions in order to use HDF to store his data. This script was written by the ACE Science Center at the California Institute of Technology.

hdfv
The hdfv tool is an HDF read-only interface via TCL. It contains "tclhdf" and "hdfv". "tclhdf" is a simple extension of tclsh, with HDF's Vgroup/Vdata queries. "hdfv" is an HDF-Viewer with a GUI based on Tk. Currently, it only supports the Vgroup/Vdata model.

Image Tools library
FTP link. The San Diego Supercomputer Center's Image Tools library includes the imconv command-line tool for converting among many image formats, including HDF

NAP
NAP (n-dimensional array processor) is a loadable extension of Tcl which provides a powerful and efficient facility for processing data in the form of n-dimensional arrays. It has been designed to provide an array-processing facility with much of the functionality of languages such as APL, F90,IDL, J, Matlab and Octave. It has interfaces to HDF and netCDF. NAP was developed as part of the CSIRO CAPS project, but can be loaded and used without the (satellite oriented) CAPS extension. (5/05)

OpenDX
OpenDX is the open source software version of IBM's Visualization Data Explorer (DX). It is a general-purpose software package for data visualization and analysis. The data model is fully supported by an external disk-based representation (format) for import and export. Data may also be imported through public domain structures like Unidata's netCDF, NASA's CDF and the HDF Groups, user-created custom filters and a general array handler.

Overture
This application is an object oriented C++ framework for solving PDEs on complicated geometries. It has been tested on SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris, SGI and DEC systems.

REINAS
The Real-time Environmental Information Network and Analysis System (REINAS) is a system built to support realtime data acquisition, management, and visualization of environmental data. The Santa Cruz Laboratory for Visualization and Graphics (SLVG) group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses HDF as the choice of file input for REINAS.

Rocketeer
Rocketeer is a powerful tool for visualizing 3 dimensional scientific data sets. Rocketeer differs from many visualization tools in its ability to handle many different types of grids on which the data is defined. Rocketeer can display data from multiple files and/or multiple data sets from the same file on a single image. Rocketeer can perform the same graphics operations on a series of data sets automatically to produce frames for animation. For further information see the home page for the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tela
Tela (the TEnsor LAnguage) is a numerical computing environment mainly targeted for numerical simulation pre- and post-processing work. It supports multidimensional integer, real and complex arrays and uses HDF as the native save/load format. Speed was an important design goal, and Tela is often faster than other interpreted languages. Tela has been written in C++ and it can be installed on most Unix platforms.

VCS
The Visualization and Computation System VCS version 2.7 supports the HDF format for both read and write operations. VCS greatly facilitates the selection, manipulation, and display of scientific data. By specifying the desired data set, the graphics method, and the display template, the VCS user gains virtually complete control over the appearance of the data display and associated text. Although VCS is designed expressly to meet the needs of climate scientists, the breadth of its capabilities make it a useful tool for other scientific applications. VCS was developed by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

zeGraph
zeGraph is a 3D data visualization library. It includes a utility for reading and writing HDF with Lua (The standard version of zeGraph is free, but the maximum render size is limited to 800 by 800 pixels.)

Very Old NCSA tools
These are very old tools that have NOT been updated to run with the current version of HDF, but are still available from the NCSA FTP server:
• Mosaic - NCSA web browser that supported HDF files
• Collage - NCSA Collage is a collaborative visualization program, allowing the user to collaborate and share data across the three supported platforms: X-Windows workstations, Apple Macintosh systems, Microsoft Windows systems.

• Polyview - NCSA Polyview is a software tool for interactive visualization and analysis of 3D geometrical structures. Polyview 3.1 reads data files in NCSA HDF Vset format and automatically derives animation sequences based on available information.

• X DataSlice - NCSA X DataSlice allows the user to manipulate 3D images under X11, using the HDF file format and libraries.

• Other NCSA visualization software - Some of this software is dated.