This interface was built in 2008 to provide a more integrated interface to the many plasma, magnetic field and energetic particle data sets relevant to heliospheric studies and resident at Goddard's Space Physics Data Facility. It delivers users to underlying interfaces (OMNIWeb, COHOWeb, FTPBrowser, CDAWeb, Helioweb, spdf/ftp) offering various functionalities for various data sets.

In using this interface, the user first selects a spacecraft (from groups of 1 AU vs. deep space spacecraft) or the unique multi-spacecraft OMNI data set or the option to compare data from the spacecraft making up each of nine families of spacecraft. Upon selecting and "expanding" a spacecraft (by clicking the "+" on its line), one sees the various data sets available from the spacecraft. Upon further selecting and expanding a data set, the user is able to select one of possibly multiple interfaces offering various functionalities.

Most spacecraft-specific data sets are ftp-accessible from spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/ in ASCII format, while CDAWeb-accessible data are ftp-accessible from cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov in CDF. The main value-added interfaces offer the ability to plot or list any subset of parameters in the data set, for any time span. For many data sets, there are additional interfaces supporting creation of scatter plots, linear regression fits and cross correlations between pairs of parameters as well as distribution functions (occurrence frequency vs. parameter value bin), means, medians and standard deviations for individual parameters. Both these latter interface types provide the ability to filter, i.e., to select parameter values only from records when those values and/or the values of any other parameters in the records fall into some user-specified numeric range(s).

The data set comparison option offers nine "families" of data sets, with the ability to plot overlaid traces for individual physical parameters from multiple sources or to create scatter plots, linear regression fits and correlation coefficients, with filtering, for individual physical parameters from a pair of sources. For solar wind plasma densities and temperatures, the ability to exercise the latter interface type for either the parameter values themselves or the logarithms thereof is provided.

Many underlying interfaces have their own "about using this interface" option with more details than above.

The data to which this family of interfaces provides access are described at
http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/about_data.html

Note: OMNI has no special abbreviation, just "variety"