Hierarchical Data Format

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a set of file formats (HDF4, HDF5) designed to store and organize large amounts of data. Originally developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it is supported by The HDF Group, a non-profit corporation whose mission is to ensure continued development of HDF5 technologies and the continued accessibility of data stored in HDF.

In keeping with this goal, the HDF libraries and associated tools are available under a liberal, BSD-like license for general use. HDF is supported by many commercial and non-commercial software platforms, including Java, MATLAB, Scilab, Octave, Mathematica, IDL, Python, R, and Julia. The freely available HDF distribution consists of the library, command-line utilities, test suite source, Java interface, and the Java-based HDF Viewer (HDFView).

The current version, HDF5, differs significantly in design and API from the major legacy version HDF4.

Early history

The quest for portable scientific data format, originally dubbed AEHOO (All Encompassing Hierarchical Object Oriented format) began in 1987 by the Graphics Foundations Task Force (GFTF) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NSF grants received in 1990 and 1992 were important to the project. Around this time NASA investigated 15 different file formats for use in the Earth Observing System (EOS) project. After a two year review process, HDF was selected as the standard data and information system.