In comparison to standard OI, used in Data assimilation, DIVA, when applied to ocean data, takes into account coastlines, sub-basins and advection because of its variational formulation on the real domain.
Quality control of data can be performed and error fields can be calculated.
Finally 3D and 4D extensions are included with emphasis on direct computations of climatologies from ODV[4] spreadsheet files.
The software whose first version was available since 1996,[5] can now be downloaded at the DIVA Archived 2017-12-01 at the Wayback Machine site and is the reference tool for calculating climatologies within the SeaDataNet projects.
It has also been included as the state-of-the art gridding method in Ocean Data View.