New Media Research Institute

May 22, 2003
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.”