DDS has a full featured API for handling multidimensional seismic data in a variety of data formats. Tools for manipulating data only, data+headers, user parameters, dictionaries, and print files lead to an extensive (and often confusing) list of DDS functions. This Code Slinger area attempts to guide developers to the most important DDS functions first. The goal is to achieve a respectable level of DDS capability, allowing you to use DDS to implement geophysical applications for many common problems.
From the most distant functional view, DDS does two things:
When developing applications, it is useful to put the relative importance of the DDS API in perspective. The "distant functional view" is useful because it downplays the importance of DDS in geophysical algorithms.
DDS knows very little about geophysics. Algorithms, geophysical methods, and computational methods are the responsibility of application developers.
What DDS does best is provide data and information about those data to the application. In addition to this, DDS gives users control over program function, provides feedback on how the program sees data and user parameters, and writes results in one of many formats understood by DDS and other tools.