Corporate | Government | Institutional | Academic
ADL ACTIVE PARTNERS AS OF JULY 1997

CORPORATE

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)
Excalibur/Conquest
Hughes
Informix/Illustra
Microsoft
Oracle
SPOT Image

GOVERNMENT

California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)
Library of Congress
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA)
United States Geological Survey (USGS)
United States Navy:

INSTITUTIONAL

American Geophysical Institute

ACADEMIC

University of New Mexico/Earth Data Analysis Center
University of San Diego/San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of Tulsa/Petroleum Abstracts
Utah State University

University Of California, Santa Barbara:

ACTIVE CORPORATE PARTNERS

DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC)

DEC and ADL reached an agreement for equipment, software and engineering assistance, culminating in the acquisition, in November 1996, of a large Digital AlphaServer 4100. This system is configured with with 2 300 MHz Alpha (64-bit) processors, 2 GB of RAM, 2 6-channel RAID controllers, and 74 4.3 GB SCSI disks, for a total of 318 GB of online storage. DEC contributed over 70% of the purchase price of this system, which will provide primary storage for ADL, hosting our master catalog.

We intend for this system to support very large (multi-million record) Oracle databases, which should be able to exploit the native 64-bit memory addressing capability of the Alpha hardware. For Digital's benefit, we will help to characterize the behavior of a large database applications in this environment. Digital is also committed to help ADL clone an installation of the ADL catalog to a similarly-configured Alpha site outside UCSB.

As part of the agreement with DEC, ADL's primary deliverable will be an operational test bed for digital library technology, including a distributed but integrated software package for accessing, browsing, cataloging, storing, and manipulating distributed spatial data materials via the Internet. ADL will also cooperate with DEC engineers in characterizing performance, in the Alexandria systems environment, of the DEC hardware.

DEC Contact:
Gary Cantwell
111 Powermill Rd. MS02-3/E21
Maynard, MA 01754
phone: 508/493-8124
email: gary.cantwell@ljo.dec.com

ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS RESEARCH INSTITUTE (ESRI)

The Implementation Team worked with two ESRI products in 1996: MapObjects and the Spatial Data Engine (SDE). Using ESRI MapObjects, we developed a new map browser, as a drop-in substitute for the WP's original map browser (based on code obtained from Xerox PARC). This exercise served two purposes:

1.In specifying the interface for a second map browser, and the ability to transparently switch between them, we generalized the WP's map browser interface, an important step toward ``disassembling'' the WP into a constellation of reconfigurable interface components. 2.Unlike the Xerox PARC map browser, which is not commercially available and which we are not permitted to redistribute, the MapObjects map browser uses readily available components, and thus facilitates the ``cloning'' of the WP at sites outside ADL's control.

Two Implementation Team engineers attended SDE version 2 training at ESRI. After conducting a preliminary evaluation of the product, we determined that it did not meet ADL's needs. Based partly on our feedback, ESRI has re-designed SDE; the new version 3 of the product appears to address several of our original concerns. ADL will continue to work with ESRI in making GIS data and functionality available in a digital library environment.

ESRI Contact:
Gao Peng
380 New York St.
Redlands, CA 92373
email: pgao@esri.com

EXCALIBUR/CONQUEST

Excalibur/Conquest has provided both software and extensive training to ADL which has been incorporated into the testbed. In future plans for the ADL operational system Excalibur will be the full text search engine of choice for ADL.

Excalibur Contact:
Georgia Merryman
2000 Corporate Ridge Suite 1095
McLean, VA 22102
phone: 703/761-5279
email: georgia@excalib.com

HUGHES

ADL has contracted with Hughes Information Technology Systems (HITS) of Landover, MD to provide gazetteer software for incorporation into the EOSDIS Core System. Hughes Information Technology Systems has contracted with NASA to develop the Earth Core System (ECS) client for access to EOSDIS data. Part of the functional requirements for the interface is to allow users to define their regions of interest by placename. That is, to support the entry of a named geographic entity - such as the North Atlantic, Denver, or Santa Barbara County - and translate that named place into a spatial footprint to serve as the target area for a spatial search of the EOSDIS data. In addition, the system is expected to allow named places to be identified by their type - such as hydrographic features, populated places, and manmade features.

The Alexandria Digital Library has implemented a gazetteer and currently supports the functionality needed by the ECS Client. In addition, we have developed a Content Standard, on the model of the FGDC Content Standard, for gazetteer entities. Hughes has therefore sub-contracted with ADL on this aspect of their client development and we are working with them to further develop and implement an enhanced gazetteer service.

The core functionality of a gazetteer service is the linking of spatial (latitude/longitude) footprints to named geographic entities (GEs). With this linking, translations can take place from a GE name to its footprint or from a spatial target area to the set of GEs that it contains. For ADL's gazetteer, each GE is identified by its type. This gives the gazetteer service the added power of supporting a query such as "What hydrographic features are in this target area?"

With Hughes Funding, ADL has made the following advancements in gazetteer development: (1) implemented the new gazetteer content standard in a relational database model and (2) developed a new thesaurus of feature type terminology. The next step is to populate a new gazetteer service, both for ADL and for the ECS Client, using the new schema and the new set of feature type terminology. The gazetteer will also be enhanced with more GEs and with more bounding box and detailed boundary footprints.

Hughes Contact:
Giulietta Fargion
1616 McCormick Blvd.
Upper Marlboro, MD 20774
phone: 301/925-0807
email: gfargion@eos.hitc.com

INFORMIX/ILLUSTRA

The Illustra DBMS (now owned by Informix Software, Inc.) is the primary catalog DBMS for the WP. Currently, we serve the full catalog and gazetteer with Illustra version 3.2 on Solaris, and a smaller California-only catalog and gazetteer with Illustra version 2.4 on Digital UNIX. Our 6M-record gazetteer is one of the largest spatial databases supported by Illustra.

Under the terms of the agreement whereby Illustra commercialized the UC developed Postgres DBMS, UCSB received a permanent 25-user Illustra license. This license is currently split so that ADL receives up to 10 simultaneous users (which, due the implementation of Illustra licenses, actually provides at least 300 simultaneous connections to an Illustra server). In purchasing Illustra, Informix has assumed this obligation for the Illustra server's successor products. Informix has also provided free, informal technical support in the form of documentation, email consulting, and (most notably) an expedited fix for a serious spatial indexing bug. We are currently negotiating with Informix to formalize and expand their relationship with ADL.

Informix Contact:
Holly Lugassy
4100 Bohannon Dr.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
phone: 415/926-6055
email: lugassy@informix.com

MICROSOFT

ADL and the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center contracted to perform a feasibility study for a 1 TB online (i.e. all-disk) Web-accessible database. The feasibility study, completed in January 1997, demonstrated a 30 GB Web-accessible image database supported entirely by Microsoft software (Windows NT Server, Internet Information Server, SQL Server, Internet Explorer). The ADL Implementation Team prepared the database content (USGS digital orthophoto quadrangles) and advised Microsoft on database schema and user interface issues.

Following the successful demonstration of the 30 GB database, work has begun on the 1 TB version. Microsoft has currently committed $64K (plus an addtional $8K software and documentation) and loaned a Digital Alphaserver system running Windows NT to UCSB, to help prepare a large portion of the 1 TB dataset.

Microsoft intends for the 1 TB system to be a showcase for Microsoft software in a very large-scale data management environment, using content of sufficiently broad appeal to compel a large Web audience. Under ADL's guidance, content is also being selected that will be useful to a geo-spatial data library, both in its own right, and as a frame dataset for the user interface. For these reasons ADL and Microsoft have agreed that digital orthophoto quadrangles and high-resolution Russian satellite imagery will be the primary datasets used to achieve a 1 TB load.

Following its initial demonstration in May 1997, ADL intends to host the 1 TB system at UCSB and operate it both as a showcase for Microsoft and as the kernel of the operational version of ADL.

Microsoft Contact:
Tom Barclay
301 Howard St. Suite 830
San Francisco, CA 94105
phone: 415/778-8223
email: tbarclay@microsoft.com

ORACLE

Oracle Corporation and ADL have interacted in the following ways: participation by Oracle personnel in most of the major activities of the Alexandria Project, including interactions with ADL's other partners and the five other DL Initiative projects; input from Oracle, as a major partner in ADL, concerning the future development directions of ADL in particular, and DLs in general; the presence of a high-level person from Oracle on the Advisory Board of ADL; the provision to ADL by Oracle of applicable software modules for evaluation and application in the development of ADL, as well as strong technical support for the use of the software; visits by personnel from ADL to Oracle and by Oracle personnel to UCSB to exchange technical information exchange; and support by Oracle for ADL research activities, including support for graduate students and other researchers.

Oracle assigned Mr. Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert, a senior engineer, to work with the project, and he has made several extended visits to install Oracle products in the testbed and to help with training the Implementation Team in their use.

The specific focus of the joint activities include:

1. Application and evaluation of Oracle's relational database software to relation to support for constructing, searching, and updating the metadatabase; `object oriented'' database software to support the storage and accessing of complex objects in the metadatabase; Textserver products for full text search of large, structured metadatabases; Spatial Database Option to spatial search of the metadatadatabase; CASE tools in the construction of the metadatabases; knowledge about the parallel support for efficient database services.

2. Development of object-oriented models for ADL's metadata.

3. Development of spatial indexing of georeferenced information.

4. Development of tools for the automated ingest of metadata, including metadata from other DLs 5. The development and implementation of standards and protocols relating to metadata for spatially-indexed items and for its exchange. 6. The development of WWW interfaces to the Alexandria catalog and the for efficient database support in WWW environments

To date, the Implementation Team worked with Oracle to set up a reference implementation of the Oracle DBMS and Spatial Data Option (SDO), in order to evaluate Oracle/SDO as a potential host for the ADL catalog. Oracle's primary contribution to this effort has been the extended visits to Santa Barbara of Mr. Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert. As a result of his interactions with ADL, we now have the following Oracle environment in place:

Since SDO is not yet supported on Digital UNIX (our platform-of-choice for the ADL catalog), we have set up a second Oracle installation, with SDO, on a Solaris host for experimentation. The Digital UNIX installation supports our complete catalog and gazetteer and is currently being tuned for the host system configuration, which involves 2 processors, 2 GB RAM, 24GB (expandable to 312GB) of RAID-4 disk.

Oracle Contact:
Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert

SPOT IMAGE

The SPOT Corporation has supplied its collective set of worldwide metadata records and sample images and is preparing browse images for California, a dataset held by UCSB. Discussions continue regarding security, copyright, payment via the Web processes, third-party services and data delivery systems.

SPOT Contact:
Rob Lees
1897 Preston White Dr.
Reston, VA 22091
phone: 703/715-3112
email: lees@CCGATE.SPOT.COM

ACTIVE GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

CALIFORNIA ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES EVALUATION SYSTEM (CERES)

CERES is the California Resource Agency's project to increase access to environmental data in the state, primarily but not limited to data produced by state agencies. Since much of this data is georeferenced, and an even larger proportion of CERES data sets have well-defined geographic footprints, there is obvious potential for the technologies being developed by ADL, and for ADL to collaborate in providing operational access to CERES data.

To date, ADL has mounted and is providing access to the data of the Sierra Nevada Environment Project (SNEP), both via file-based ftp and through the ADL interface.

CERES Contact:
Gary Darling
1416 Ninth St. Suite 1311
Sacramento, CA 95814
phone: 916/653-4279
email: gary@ceres.ca.gov

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Several meetings and presentations have taken place and a verbal agreement has been made to have Alexandria serve out to the Web scanned mapping data currently being prepared by the Geography and Map Division. As part of our on-going agreement, LC scanned several uncopyrighted maps of Santa Barbara for inclusion into Alexandria. This was a test case to determine how Alexandria would deal with their files. Alexandria is to catalog those items not currently cataloged as their part of the test.

Library of Congress Contact:
Winston Tabb

NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA)

Apart from the base funding that is being provided to ADL from NASA as part of DLI, NASA is also providing support for Dr. Linda Hill to work for the project during the period November 1996-October 1997. In addition to holding a PhD in the area of library science, Dr. Hill is an expert in the area of metadata for spatial digital collections, and served as the library liaison for the Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS) Subgroup of the Data Management Working Group of GCDIS.

An important function of Dr. Hill's position from the perspective of NASA is to provide a link between the GCDIS, ADL, and the five other DLI projects. In particular, the position is intended to attain the following objectives:

1. Develop a Gazetteer Content Standard. In relation to this goal, GCDIS and the participating agencies will be involved in the review and testing of the proposed content standard for gazetteer information and in the proposal to develop a web-based entry system to support the contribution of new gazetteer information. Dr. Hill is also investigating ways in which to improve the feature class/type hierarchy now in place for the ADL gazetteer. It is planned to extend this hierarchy into a thesaurus format to be supported in ADL by thesaurus software. Both catalogers and searchers will then be able to browse the feature thesaurus for available terminology for either description or retrieval.

2. Research various issues relating to terminology tools such as thesauri and concept spaces. This set of activities involves ADL's research project with the Universities of Illinois and Arizona to develop a concept space in the field of earth science using as a core a large set of records from two indexing and abstracting services. Beyond text, the investigation will involve the application of the concept space approach to images, where a given image icon (segment of an image) is related to other image icons. Concept space results will be made available for beta testing to GCDIS participants.

NASA Contact:
Lola Olsen
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Code 900
Greenbelt, MD
phone: 301/614-5361
email: olsen@gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov

NATIONAL IMAGERY AND MAPPING AGENCY (NIMA)

NIMA, a new agency formed by combining the Defense Mapping Agency and the Central Imagery Office, provided $150K of funding support for research into metadata issues. This research will focus mainly on three problems: (1) catalog access and image access in terms of the Standards Profile for Imagery Access, involving use of various API's; (2) generation of metadata from metadata, and issues of information inferable from metadata; (3) evaluation of various items, such as the VPF successor to DCW, in relation to the Alexandria atlas subproject.

In August 1996 ADL contracted with the NIMA to prototype distributed image access services based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Specifically, we are using our existing catalog database to test NIMA's Image Access Service (IAS) specification, as specified in CORBA's Interface Definition Language (IDL). We will report to NIMA on implementability and functionality of IAS specification.

At the same time the collaboration will expose ADL to the issue of distributed catalog services, particularly as implemented in a CORBA environment. After evaluating several popular CORBA development packages (Xerox ILU; Digital ObjectBroker; Visigenic VisiBroker; Iona Orbix), we installed Digital ObjectBroker in December 1996. Our CORBA development is now progressing on two fronts:

1. Develop server code based on the IAS IDL specification and Digital ObjectBroker functionality.

2. Wrap the current ADL catalog access method in a C-language dynamically-linked library (DLL), so it can be referenced by ObjectBroker.

We also devoted a significant effort to tracking the evolution of the IAS specification and coordinating our activities with NIMA. We expect to complete the initial IAS prototype in April 1997.

NIMA Contact:
Dave Lutz

UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY (USGS)

Interactions and exchanges of personnel have occurred over the year. ADL participates in the on-going FGDC Clearinghouse discussions. ADL and USGS have had continuing discussions on gazetteer standards, data serving, and the linking of existing USGS databases to ADL.

As part of our collection development for our joint project with Microsoft, we are working with USGS Headquarters (Hedy Rossmeissl) and National Mapping Division (George Lee) to acquire the complete set of published digital orthophoto quadrangles (DOQs). This dataset comprises over 41,000 grayscale images with an aggregate compressed size of over 200 GB. Each image is rectified to one quarter of a standard 7.5-minute USGS topographic quadrangle. This dataset is an unrivaled source of high-resolution, planimetric imagery of a significant fraction of the United States. When available online, it will be ADL's flagship collection.

The University of Colorado Team recently completed a series of focus groups to assist U.S. Geological Survey evaluate a prototype interface design for their planned National Atlas of the United States. The product will be a Web-based atlas of maps, data and imagery available from Federal data producers, targeted for the lay public and in schools. USGS is interested in further interface evaluation efforts, including transaction log monitoring by the CU Team once a working Web prototype is established. Discussions for USGS funding for that effort are underway.

USGS Contact:
Beth Duff
101 National Center
Reston, VA 22092
phone: 703/648-4621
email: bduff@usgs.gov

UNITED STATES NAVY

United States Navy, Stennis

The United States Navy Oceanographic Navigation Group at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi provided strong financial support for the acquisition of of the Alpha 4100 series from DEC. Visits of personnel from NAVO took place in February 1997 in order to gather information on Web technology for naval applications. Landry Bernard III of the Oceanographic Navigation Group is a member of the Advisory Board of ADL.

Navy Contact at Stennis:
Bob Starek
phone: 601/688-5189
email: rstarek@sunfish.navo.navy.mil

United States Navy, San Diego (NRaD)

In 1995-1996, NRaD at San Diego sponsored research by the Performance and Parallel Processing Team concerning:

1. scheduling techniques for high performance WWW servers on scalable parallel machines;

2. porting the SWEB implementation to the NRaD Convex parallel machine, with the task of evaluating the performance of the parallel WWW server (SWEB) and redesigning the system based on the Convex architecture model;

3.carrying out research to evaluate the performance of such DL operations as wavelet-based image browsing in the Convex machine.

The main objective is to use the existing NRaD Convex machine to strengthen the processing capabilities of the NRaD server in accommodating a large number of simultaneous access requests from different Navy clients on the Internet.

The main faculty and students involved these tasks are Yang, Andresen, Holmedahl, and Watson, with help from Ibarra and Poulakidas. During last year, the NRaD team (Wasilausky, Bui) and the UCSB team visited each other, and exchanged the ideas concerning system development and implementation. Since there are significant architectural differences between the Meiko CS-2 and SUN clusters on which SWEB is built on the one hand and NRaD's HP/Convex shared memory machine on the other, a new set of load monitoring and request re-assignment techniques have been developed and implemented. The current Convex machine contains a number of sub-complexes and the SWEB is extended and modified to perform load balancing between those sub-complexes. We have developed the SWEB sub-complex load monitor and the performance estimator and we have conducted experiments on file retrievals and wavelet transforms to demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques developed. We have also developed a graphical test tool with a Java interface for evaluating the performance of the system under multiple requests, and a graphical interface for multi-resolution image browsing. This image browsing interface is well-developed and wil be integrated in to the Alexandria testbed system during the coming year.

Navy NRAD Contact:
Bob Wasilausky
phone: 619/553-4066
email: wasilaus@quince.nosc.mil

ACTIVE INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL INSTITUTE

The American Geological Institute (AGI), through GeoRef, signed an agreement with UCSB in which they have committed to giving ADL their GeoRef Thesaurus in electronic form and more than 300,000 bibliographic records which will be used to develop a concept space for the earth sciences by Hsinchun Chen at the University of Arizona. In addition, they have agreed to give ADL a set of bibliographic records for articles, government reports, conference papers, etc. that are indexed to California and that contain bounding box coordinates representing the study areas of the documents. ADL staff worked with GeoRef to develop conversion routines from their internal format to USMARC so that their records could be more easily ingested into ADL. The GeoRef records can remain in the ADL for the duration of the project. The first of the sample USMARC records have been received.

GeoRef Contact:
John Mulvihill
American Geological Institute
4220 King Street
Alexandria.VA 22302
phone: 703-379-2480
email: jmulvihill@agiweb.org

ACTIVE ACADEMIC PARTNERS

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO/EARTH DATA ANALYSIS CENTER

An MOU was put in place this year between the center (a part of the University of New Mexico) and ADL. It was agreed that they would catalog their data (imagery, mapping and reports) using the ADL metadata standard and link each record to their stored data. ADL will load their metadata catalog and construct links to individual objects in their data store. They are in the process of seeking funding to support this new service effort.

UNM Contact:
Stanley Morain
2500 Yale Blvd. SE Suite 100
Albuquerque, NM 87131
phone: 505/277-3622
email: edac@spock.unm.edu

UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO/SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER

Two major sets of interactions with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have occurred over the past year, apart from the member of Reagan Moore on the Advisory Board of ADL. These activities include (1) the cloning of ADL at SDSC as a first step in moving towards a distributed version of ADL; (2) the organization of working groups on metadata and scientific dataset collections, as a first step in moving towards the support of scientific dataset collections in ADL; and (3) participation in a proposal for the renewal of SDSC that involves a significant DL functionality.

The Cloning of ADL at SDSC
ADL and SDSC have completed an agreement whereby SDSC will eventually maintain a complete mirror of the ADL catalog and holdings. The mirror will actually be a proper superset, in that SDSC will add metadata and storage for their own collections. SDSC's unrivaled Internet connectivity will allow it to function as an alternative ADL server, and its immense tertiary storage capacity will serve as the default backup for ADL holdings.

To date, we have set up a mirror ADL catalog site at SDSC, and populated it with California-only metadata subset. This initial experiment has been a complete success; it is now possible to retarget the WP user interface to the SDSC catalog with no impact on the functioning of the WP.

Proposal to Coordinate the Activities of Four DLI Partners in a National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)
ADL has joined a large and potentially important partnership, led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center, that is focused on writing a proposal for a National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. In particular, ADL is coordinating a set of DL activities that will play an important role in the proposed infrastructure. Four of the DLI projects are involved in this coordinated set of activities, including University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Michigan, and Stanford University.

The proposed activities centered at UCSB for the first year relating to DL support for data-handling environments in general and for a DL for Earth Systems Science in particular will include:

1. The design, implementation, and initial testing of a user interface to provide Internet, and particularly World Wide Web (WWW), access to the DL components of the NPACI.

2. The design, implementation, and initial testing of a meta-information environment to support access to information from the area of Earth Systems Science.

3. The design, implementation, and initial testing of work-centered information services for scientific applications.

4. The construction of a limited set of collection items in the Earth Systems Sciences, including examples of scientific datasets, images, digitized maps, and digitized text documents. This work will be based on technology developed at SDSC and UCSB and will be centered at these two sites and at UCB. In particular, software developers at UCSB will design and implement the system in collaboration with a digital librarian at UCSB and a mass storage expert at SDSC.

Based on this initial development, there will be, at the end of the first year, a limited testbed DL. Users will be able to employ the WWW in searching and/or browsing for data in this testbed, using the catalog of the Alexandria Digital Library at UCSB; to have their search extended to other catalogs (such as that as UCB) on the basis of the technology developed at Stanford; to download the datasets, or other documents, in which they have an interest in from the mass storage system at SDSC; and to employ some of the workspace services provided by the UCB developments. The interface to the system will provide a ``transparent'' look and feel, so that users do not need to be aware of the location of either the data or the catalogue.

The second year of development will focus on moving towards a limited, but true, operational phase for a DL facility supporting NPACI activities. Many of the activities for the second year, relating to DL support for data-handling environments in general and for a DL for Earth Systems Science in particular, will involve extensions and continuations of the activities commenced in the first year.

1. The design, implementation, and testing of the user interface(s) will be extended to include a wider range of functionality, and to move the interface towards a true ``workspace'' environment that supports a large range of scientific modeling activities. This work will be centered at both UCSB and UCB, with the integration of a broader set of work-centered information services, such as the integration of a variety of scientific modeling tools.

2. The design, implementation, and testing of the meta-information environment to support access to information from the area of Earth Systems Science will be extended with a variety of both metadata types and query/document matching services. Specific attention will be focused on providing meta-information about procedures that may be applied in the DL workspace. Meta-information will also be developed to indicate ``authentification'' and levels of ``approval'' for both declarative information objects and for procedural information objects. Software will be designed and built that supports the automated extraction of meta-information. This software will include format converters, automatic metadata extractors, and indexing software. While it is anticipated that the final process will involve some human effort, the intent is that large parts of the process will be automated and that facilities will be provided to allow the construction of self-describing information objects.

3. The continuing development of information access protocols based on the CORBA specifications for distributed object frameworks. Proxies for a variety of distributed DL services will be constructed within this framework. This work will be be centered at Stanford and SDSC.

4.The construction of a reasonably full collection of items to support research activities in the Earth Systems Sciences, including many classes of datasets, images, digitized maps, and digitized text documents.

Under the terms of the proposal, the end of the second year should see the completion of an operational distributed DL, available to researchers within the NPACI framework. This DL will be the kernel of a full, operational DL that will exist at the end of the five-year period. This DL facility is intended to provide support for ingesting data in several formats, converting it to a format suitable for inclusion in the Alexandria Digital Library, indexing it into the catalogue at UCSB and inserting the data into the mass storage system at SDSC. It will also provide a variety of work-centered services and support interoperability between different DL operations, such as at UCSB, UCB, and Stanford, using a distributed object framework.

SDSC Contact:
Reagan Moore
P.O. Box 85608
San Diego, CA 92186
phone: 619/534-5073
email: moore@sdsc.edu

UNIVERSITY OF TULSA/PETROLEUM ABSTRACTS

The University of Tulsa has a unit that indexes the world's exploration and production literature for the petroleum industry. The product is known as Petroleum Abstracts. They have also agreed to let us use approximately 300,000 of their bibliographic records and their thesauri for the building of an earth sciences concept space.

UT contact:
Rafael Ubico
600 South College Ave - HH100
Tulsa, OK 74104
phone: 918/631-2297
email: rubico@tured.pa.utulsa.edu

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

The Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program (MDEP) project represents a long-term, joint venture between the DoD, DoI, State and Academic organizations with interests in the Mojave Ecosystem. The goal, over the next few years, is to provide those interested in the management and/or research in this region a spatial database of Natural and Cultural resources data that are co-registered to a common map base, and cover the entire ecoregion.

The linkage between the MDEP and Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is a natural one. It's intent is to design the MDEP database to be compliant with ADL metadata structures and hence meet national standards for metadata creation, data storage, and retrieval. ADL users will have complete access to information served by the MDEI web server located at Fort Irwin, California.

A liaison between UCSB and Utah State University (USU) is in the process of converting spatial and text based information collected for the MDEP into FGDC/ADL compliant metadata. The work completed so far includes developing an understanding of ADL metadata structures and a method of converting current metadata records into this structure. Furthermore, initial steps have been completed for the inclusion of a spatially referenced bibliography developed by USU for the MDEP into ADL. The work that we plan to have completed by 6/30/97 includes (1) a complete inclusion of metadata records developed for the MDEP into ADL; (2) the development of a user interface to allow spatial queries to a spatially referenced bibliography; and (3) an investigation of methods of accessing and analyzing data through ADL.

USU Contact:
Doug Ramsey
Dept. Geography & Earth Resources
Logan, UT 84322
phone: 801/797-3783
email: doug@nr.usu.edu

ADL PARTNERS WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA


Corporate | Government | Institutional | Academic