The Client Side Technology Infusion Working Group is looking at issues of data access, analysis, and display in the world outside the Internet browser environment. Today, as it was ten years ago, probably 95% of the scientists who use NASA/NOAA (etc.) data sets do so with commercial software products such as Matlab, IDL, ENVI, or ARCgis.

Started July 4, the Zaca fire burned for nearly two months before it was contained on September 2, 2007. Nearby Santa Barbara City residents watched and waited while this, the largest fire in the history of the county (240,207 acres total), moved ever closer to the inhabited front country. As firefighters battled, NASA's MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program captured the active burn area several times a day. At the end of August, with towering heat clouds in the sky and ash covering the ground in Santa Barbara City, ACCESS DIAL project technical lead, Marty Landsfeld, noticed satellite data images in the local papers and determined that an animation of the progression of the fire would help inform the population. In one afternoon, using the DIAL technology, he was able to assemble an animation of 104 MODIS data images, including their date and time information. On August 28, the Zaca Fire NASA Data Animation was hosted on the web at NASA Zaca fire data animation.

The DIAL Project 2007 Workshop was held at the Summer ESIP Federation meeting in Madison Wisconsin. Participants from NASA labs, universities, and museums learned how DIAL authoring tools can put real data into easy to use software applications.

The DIAL 2007 Workshop Image Gallery shows the group hard at work.

After six months of coding and refactoring, the OSX version of the IDL plugin to Director is undergoing testing at the Institute. The Plugin currently has Carbon and Mach 0 versions (Director is a Carbon application, and IDL is Mach 0). The Institute (like all Director users) is waiting for Adobe to announce the upgrade to Director, which should make this a Mach 0 application too. Until that time, the OS X plugin will remain in beta mode.

The New Media Research Institute teamed up with Integration New Media to upgrade the IDL Xtra for the Mac. Calling on the leading-edge Xtra developers at INM, the Institute was able to accelerate it's Apple-side Xtra development for the DIAL technology effort.

On April 11, 2007, Bruce Caron gave a presentation on the DIAL technology at the Education and Outreach Colloquium of the Earth Sciences Division at GSFC. Simultaneously webcast, the presentation walked the audience through the advantages of using DIAL for data-rich application development.
The talk presentation is now on the GSFC website:
Education and Outreach Colloquium, Bruce Caron

You can link directly to the presentation (as a PDF file) here:

September 10, 2004

March 2004
For this project to create interactive Java-based software products, the Institute will be working on a new effort to automate the pedagogical evaluation of learning software through the development of "evaluation layers" that can be programmed by education experts to test the users on their knowledge before and after the use of the software. The Institute is working on a subcontract with the University of Wisconsin, and will be subcontracting educational content development in the area of marine ecology to UCSB's Marine Science Institute and PISCO project.

March 2004
The Studio will be creating a new IDL interfaces for the OPENdap project. These will connect the entire OPENdap community to resources and other information about this distributed data access effort. The work is through a subcontract with OPENdap and the University of Rhode Island.

June 17, 2001
NSDL Data Discovery