Minutes of Digital Earth Cluster Working Meeting - Dec 5

Present
Rob Raskin (OceanESIP), Bruce Caron (Planet Earth Science), Ken Keiser (UAH), Dave Jones (StormCenter.com), Greg Yetman (CIESIN), Sri Vinayagamoorthy (CIESIN), James Gallagher (DODS), Marguerite Syvertson (JPL), Michael Goodman (UAH), Ruixin Yang (SIESIP), Jiang Tang (SIESIP), Ken Markowitz (ELIS), Tom Yunck (GENESIS), Dan Holloway (DODS)

Announcements
ESRI's WMS_Connector for the ArcIMS is available for free download (a link is on the Cluster web page). This Connector enables any client (i.e. any browser) to access data that are currently available through ArcIMS. CIESIN installed the Connector and found some problems with the file name extension passed to the browser. This prevented browsers from directly opening the passed image files, in many cases. ESRI has been contacted regarding this bug.

Tucson Meeting Plans
We spent the first hour in telecon, then switched to a chat room for the duration of the 6 hour meeting. The chat room technology was new to most of us. Essentially 3 working groups were formed: Scenarios, Viewers, and Gateways. There was some interest in a Search Engine working group, as well.

The Scenarios group meeting was deferred to a telecon next week (Monday 12n PST, 3pm EST) due to a time conflict with another meeting. That group will produce slides for the demo covering both generic scenario development and specific scenarios.

The Viewers group discussed the live demo, including the choice of viewer. We can use Jeff de La Beaujardiere's generic viewer and possibly modify it to emphasize Federation datasets. Another viewer option for the demo is the Space-Time Toolkit, although this will require some modifications to the product. Finally, Planet Earth Science is planning to develop a Digital Earth viewer, but it will not be ready for January. Jeff will be sending us the source code for the generic viewer and Ken K. will make the Space-Time Toolkit available for us to make a closer look. Another issue is linkage of the viewer to a search engine. Rob will contact GCMD about getting the source code to the existing Federation/GCMD search engine, so that we can integrate it with the viewer (to provide access to data, not just metadata). A telecon follow-up is planned (Monday 1:30pm PST, 4:30pm EST).

The Gateways group discussed the WMS Connector and its similarities/differences with DODS. They will produce a slide and possibly a live demo for Tucson.

All are welcome to join the 2 telecons scehduled for Monday. We anticipate subsequent telecons or chat rooms will follow.