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Part III. Appendix 2: Data Transportneeds means that at the price of some activity by the server to extract a subset of data, there is (1) asmaller data set to transmit, which reduces demands on system resources, and (2) a properly-sizeddemand upon the client’s resources to accommodate and begin to use the data set.Web browser capabilities in the base systemEven a casual visitor to an IOOS facility ought to be able to browse actual data to some extent, usingnothing more than a standard browser, although perhaps with a readily available plug-in.ASCII dump of dataUsers must be able to dump a data set in a human-readable form easily. As part of implementationplanning, the DTT may wish to assign some members to consider whether there are formats otherthan plain, tab-separated ASCII (e.g., Rich Text Format, LaTeX, XML), which it would be useful tohave directly available.Security, access control, firewall penetrationSecurity must be considered at the outset, and each participant in the IOOS system must be assuredthat everything possible will be done to ensure that no harm will come to their site or theirdata as a result of their participation.Access to metadataThe metadata describing data sets available through the IOOS servers must be easily retrievedin human-readable and machine-parsable form. If XML is adopted as the format for persistentmetadata, then it should be possible to meet this requirement satisfactorily.Real-time data access versus access to retrospective archives: Push-pullservicesThe IOOS data transport component of the data system must support real-time 3 access to data aswell as access to retrospective data. The important distinction between real-time and retrospectivedata relates to the way in which the data are likely to be accessed. Real-time data are often desired155