Abstract:
The FreeForm Data Access System is a flexible system for specifying data formats to facilitate data
access, management, and use. How many data sets have you not examined or used because they were
not in the correct format for your applications? How many others have foregone analysis of your data
for the same reason? FreeForm can save you countless hours of changing the formats of data sets prior
... to analyzing them.
The large variety of data formats is a primary obstacle in the way of creating flexible data management
and analysis software. FreeForm was conceived, developed, and implemented at the National Geophysical
Data Center (NGDC) to alleviate the problems that occur when you need to use data sets with
varying native formats or to write format-independent applications.
[Summary provided by NOAA.] 
