The early focus of the effort was on information integration and search using XML as described in Crichton et al.'s paper in the CODATA meeting in 2000.

[2] After deploying OODT to the Planetary Data System and to the National Cancer Institute EDRN or Early Detection Research Network project, OODT in 2005 moved into the era of large scale data processing and management via NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) project.

Dr. Chris Mattmann at NASA JPL led a team of 3-4 developers between 2005-2009 and completely re-engineered OODT to support these new requirements.

A web application for exposing services form the underlying OODT product / workflow / resource managing Control Systems via the JAX-RS[citation needed] specification.

The overall motivation for OODT's re-architecting was described in a paper in Nature (journal) in 2013 by Mattmann called A Vision for Data Science.

OODT has been recently highlighted as contributing to NASA missions including Soil Moisture Active Passive[7] and New Horizons.