Hi,
The NSDL meetings were fascinating and covered a wide range of topics as
you might imagine with about 150 participants.
A few items that have a bearing on Unidata and THREDDS are:
-- A group from Carnegie Mellon have a Java system that provides users with
a FrontPage-like WYSIWYG interface for creating user interfaces for Java
applications and applets. They expressed a strong desire to work with
MetApps to see if they could create an environment that would enable
educators to create interfaces to the MetApps components. I already sent a
more detailed note about this to Don.
-- The Dublin Core with educational extensions called DC-Ed are the primary
building block for NSDL metadata. There are mechanism for incorporating
extensions in specific domains.
-- This is a bit esoteric but important to THREDDS: In the XML world,
Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are out of favor -- replaced by XML
schemas. I believe Stefano had indicated this earlier.
-- One of the other projects -- an online, peer-reviewed journal -- has
invited us to submit a paper on THREDDS for their next issue which will
emphasize interactivity and NSDL projects.
-- And of course the most important item is that NSF's Education and Human
Resources Division has decided to switch from using SMET (Science, Math
Engineering, Technology) to useing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,
Math), so I suppose NSDL now stands for the National STEME Digital Library
rather than the National SMETE Digital Library. I knew you'd be pleased to
hear that news.
The bulk of the information from the meetings will be published on the NSDL
Community Center Pages at:
http://www.smete.org/nsdl/index.html
-- Ben
