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Funding for the development of the Alexandria Digital Library middleware and the ADEPT Virtual Learning Environment, under the NSF DLI2 initiative, has now ended. Future support for enhancement and dissemination of the operational library infrastructure will be provided by the Davidson Library UCSB. ADL technology will be the starting point for designing a distributed geospatial library network funded by the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Initiative. Please see www.ngda.org for more information.
However, the educational evaluation component of the DLI2 project continues into 2005, and further work on the ADEPT software and its broader deployment are under way via a joint U.S. (NSF) and U.K. (JISC) funded project: DialogPlus - Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography.
Our approach is to work with multiple digital earth systems, examining the issues involved with GDL visualization generally. We will work towards the creation of a generalized layer or set of middleware services that allow the rendering of library objects in any DE system.
The Virtual South Coast subproject is a lens for focusing work on actual applications of digital earth and geospatial digital library technology. The near-term objectives are to create a detailed, navigable in real-time model of the South Coast region (defined as approximately Point Conception to Carpinteria), and use this model as the basis for investigating user interface techniques. Library search result set visualization, gazetteer integration, collection-level metadata visualization and eventual experiments with spatial hypertext are all features planned in this approach.
Theorem: DE-based applications are going to be region based, since that's where political, environmental, social & urban design solutions are needed.
For some applications and some collections, a visualization of the entire planet is preferable to the regional approach. We will continue to work with the Visual GIS group at Georgia Tech in applying their system to these applications.
Internal objectives
- create customer feedback loop to drive DE dev
- have a good visual model on which to build parameter change demos
- provide value-add for new ADL middleware nodes platform for generalized investigation of spatial data & hypertext
- find the killer app for digital earth technology
- marketing & community visibility
- develop local techniques that will apply to entire DE
External objectives
- planning & development process support. focus on housing
- virtual tourism & city marketing
- education
- support for the local sustainability mafia
- support for individual researchers
- web journal/blog & digital picture collection interties.
Possible collections
- housing information
- government & political information
- history & culture
- environmental information
- local maps & imagery subcollection
- personal collections (documents, annotations, pictures, journal entries)
