Education and Outreach Colloquium, Bruce Caron

Affiliation: New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute, Santa Barbara, CA
Event Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Location: NASA GSFC, Building 33, Room H114
Time: 12:00 PM

Files: Click here for files associated with this entry

The Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL) ACCESS Project
The Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL) ACCESS project uses plug-intechnology to add NASA data visualization and access tools to the Adobe Director™ multimedia application authoring environment. This means that, with a little additional work, stand-alone data-rich applications can be authored as easily as any other software authored using Director™. Bruce Caron will demonstrate how this authoring system works, and what it means to visualization tool builders and end users.

Under the hood of the DIAL technology are two (soon to be three) pieces of commercial, off-the-shelf software: Adobe Director™, ITTVis IDL™, and ESRI ArcEngine™. A small plug-in to Director™ links this to IDL™ or (soon) ArcEngine™. Licence agreements with ITTVis and ESRI make the resulting applications free for educational use and distribution. DIAL currently uses the OPeNDAP client in IDL™ for data access. Emerging WCS capabilities within IDL™ and ArcEngine™ will expand data access options.

The DIAL project is a technology infusion effort. We are building a community ofdevelopers looking to bring new data resources to their users. The IDL plug-in and ESRIplug-in to Director™ will be made available for free to NASA partners fornon-commercial end use. Other uses will require licensing agreements. The IDL and ArcEngine licenses are for educational use, but other agreements can be negotiated. DIAL puts the power of IDL and ArcEngine into the hands of students and the publicthrough user interfaces that a simple and easy to use.

About Our Speaker
Bruce Caron, PhD., the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara, was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban culturalgeographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools, and completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara. Through the New Media Studio, he is realizing the goal of bringing new tools and skills to the public to help democratize the technological advantages of the digital revolution. Bruce has a wide-ranging academic background in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has been active for several years in issues of digital libraries, the use of multimedia in education, and the theory of digital media.

Bruce has taught at colleges and universities in Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California and has served as the president of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the chair of the DLESE Data Access Working Group, on user working group for SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia University, and as an elected member of the NSDL Policy Committee. He is leading a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city's streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change.

He is currently the PI on a NASA ACCESS project, the Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL), which uses forefront technology to bridge between commercial off the shelf data access/visualization software and multimedia authoring software.

File(s) associated with this entry:

Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL)
(pdf file, 1.16 MB)

Bruce Caron's presentation slides in PDF format from his talk on April 11, 2007.

Posted or updated: Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Editor: Goran Halusa

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