Repository for multimedia science articles Birdie MacLennan 27 Feb 1995 17:05 UTC
Of interest to SERIALST readers, perhaps? -Birdie ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 11:30:45 -0500 Subject: MetaCenter Computational Science Highlights (fwd) *********** For Immediate Release ************ Washington, DC. -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today the availability of Computational Science Highlights, the National Metacenter's repository of multimedia science articles, on the World Wide Web (WWW). Articles in this repository demonstrate the impact that high-performance computing supported by the NSF is having on scientific progress and the quality of day-to-day living. Computational Science Highlights can be accessed via the World Wide Web at the any of the following addresses: http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Research/MetaScience/, http://www.ucar.edu/METASCI/Welcome/welcome.html, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCMS/Metascience/Home/welcome.html, http://pscinfo.psc.edu/MetaCenter/MetaScience/welcome.html, or http://www.sdsc.edu/MetaScience/welcome.html. Computational Science Highlights covers topics at all scales of scientific inquiry. Stories feature: modeling blood flow in the human heart; simulating the behavior of cancer genes and enzyme/inhibitor complexes vital to the design of new drugs; the Shoemaker-Levy comet's impact on Jupiter; and the discovery of the first planet known to exist outside of our solar system. Browsers will also find information on both Pacific and Atlantic Ocean systems, including a high-resolution animation of the general circulation of the North Atlantic. Users have the option to browse the repository's contents or to search for articles by keyword, such as researcher last name or institution. Computational Science Highlights , a prototype system, currently contains articles contributed by the members of the National MetaCenter: the Cornell Theory Center (CTC), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). MetaCenter activities such as this repository are joint efforts of the five NSF Supercomputer Centers along with other centers that naturally overlap in research and technology interests. Supported by the NSF, the development of the Computational Science Highlights repository was a logical extension of the integrated online information system of the National MetaCenter (MetaInfo) and part of the NSF Mosaic Deployment Project. Work focused on creating search and browse technologies for a distributed multimedia information resource. The complete software package, MetaSoft, is fully documented and can be downloaded from the Computational Science Highlights welcome page by anyone interested in setting up a similar system. Through a shared indexing system, the Centers have combined their illustrated science features and made them accessible via the World Wide Web. The growing sophistication of the Web as accessed through graphical browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allows the articles to be enhanced with sound and animation. The distributed system allows documents to be developed and maintained at the individual centers while access through both the search and browse engines is available through the Web servers at all collaborating supercomputing centers. This distributed document system is extensible so that new information can be added easily and other institutions (for example, high-performance computing and communications centers at the state and regional level such as the MetaCenter Regional Alliances) can participate. Moreover, the structure might be used by others to build similar, but unrelated repositories. "I am really pleased at the repository's ability to convey some of the excitement of NSF's computational science activities, through text but also through images, sounds, and movies," says Lawrence E. Brandt, NSF program manager for Advanced Scientific Computing. "The ability to reach thousands of individuals directly on the Web is a big plus over our previous print publications. I expect that the repository will be maintained and extended over time, with technical enhancements and new contributors beyond the five NSF supercomputing centers which have kicked off the project." For further information on implementation of a custom repository using the software developed in this project, contact Joshua Polterock, Senior Technical Editor, SDSC: joshuap@sdsc.edu. -- Contact: Beth Gaston Public Affairs Officer National Science Foundation (703) 306 - 1070 egaston@nsf.gov