May 22, 2003
For Immediate Release:
Contact: Bruce Caron, Ph.D.
The New Media Studio
2950 State Street
Suite C
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
USA
Work: 805 687 3515
The New Media Studio partners with the University Consortium for Atmospheric
Research (UCAR) to create user interfaces for its THREDDS data cataloging
middleware.
With a subcontract from UCAR (a non-profit corporation in Boulder, Colorado),
The New Media Studio will be creating novel technologies that can help
students study real-time weather data or decades of archived ocean, solid
earth, cryospheric, or atmospheric data in the classroom.
Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS)
make it possible for educators and researchers to publish, locate, analyze,
and visualize a wide variety of environmental data both in their classrooms
and in their laboratories. Just as the World Wide Web and digital library
technologies have simplified the process of publishing and accessing
multimedia
documents, THREDDS provides needed infrastructure for publishing and
accessing scientific data in a similarly convenient fashion.
The New Media Studio is creating a Macromedia Director™ based user
interface for THREDDS catalogs through which user/developers can create
a variety of educational applications. The Studio will also build prototypes
for two such THREDDS applications, and integrate these with its Data
Discovery Toolkit and Foundry project in the National Science Digital
Library (NSDL).
As THREDDS project lead Ben Domenico notes, “The heart of THREDDS,
however, is metadata contained in the publishable inventories and catalogs
(PICats). Based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), PICats can be
created in many different ways. Sites receiving real-time environmental
data will instrument decoders to create PICats describing data products
as they arrive. Crawlers will be implemented to create PICats by traversing
existing retrospective data collections. Since PICats do not have to reside
on the server with the data, researchers will be able to create PICats
for research publications that point to datasets residing on several data
servers. Educators will incorporate PICats of illustrative datasets into
educational modules that also include tools for data analysis and visualization.
Indeed students will eventually be able to use PICats to point to datasets
related to their research projects, just as they now use URLs to point
to relevant documents. Since they are text-based, PICats can be ‘harvested’ and
indexed in digital libraries using specialized tools that make use of
the internal structure and semantic content as well as by tools similar
to
those used by current document search engines.”
Arthur Clifford, The New Media Studio’s Technical Director says, “Having
a Macromedia Director front end for THREDDS data opens up a wide range
of inexpensive application-development opportunities.” As the code
and the applications will be freely available through the NSDL, anyone
with Macromedia capabilities will be able to access terabytes of climate
and other data for their classroom courseware.
For more information on The New Media Studio’s Data Discovery Toolkit and Foundry services, please contact:
Bruce Caron, Ph.D.
The New Media Studio
2950 State Street
Suite C
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
USA
Work: 805 687 3515
exdir@newmediastudio.org