For more almost 40 years, employees at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) Canada created and have used the in-house Ocean Data Format (ODF) to encapsulate oceanographic data.
This in-house file format was created at BIO (Bedford Institute of Oceanography) and over the years toolboxes for working with oceanographic data stored in this format have been created and used. It should be noted that important contributions to the ODF format and toolbox code base have been made by colleagues at IML (Institut Maurice-Lamontagne).
For more than 20 years now, the in-house ODF toolbox was developed and has been maintained using the commercial scientific development environment named MATLAB®. While this environment served many purposes, the increasing costs and growing restricitions of commercial software such as MATLAB® have forced some data groups to assess open source alternatives.
A few years ago the data group at BIO decided to start all new script development using the R® language within RStudio® and the Python® language. Both of these open source languages have taken off and more and more scientific work has migrated to these type of open source development environments.
This codebase, although primarily used by DFO employees, may be useful for those wishing to utilize the oceanographic data stored in ODF files.