Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS)

Evaluation for Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) 2nd Generation

Mission:
The mission of THREDDS is for students, educators and researchers to publish, contribute, find, and interact with data relating to the Earth system in a convenient, effective, and integrated fashion. Just as the World Wide Web and digital-library technologies have simplified the process of publishing and accessing multimedia documents, THREDDS is building infrastructure needed for publishing and accessing scientific data in a similarly convenient fashion.

The CIRES Education Program is collaborating with THREDDS in the evaluation of the THREDDS Second Generation project. This work is being conducted within the context of the DLESE Evaluation Services Center, of which Dr. Susan Buhr of the CIRES Outreach program, Dr. Lecia Barker of the CU Alliance for Technology Learning and Society, and Dr. Thomas Reeves, Dept. of Instructional Technology University of Georgia, Athens are principal investigators. As the major NSDL project facilitating the use of environmental data sets in educational contexts, collaboration with THREDDS is aligned with the formative evaluation goals of DLESE with respect to access to data sets.

Resources to be brought to bear for the evaluation of THREDDS Second Generation include a doctoral student that will be funded through this project and the collaboration of Evaluation Service Center personnel within Data Services Center activities as committed through the DLESE Integrated Management Plan (April 2003).

In the first funded initiative, the THREDDS team established a solid, working prototype of services and tools for creating compound documents that incorporate environmental datasets and analysis tools into digital libraries. The overarching goal for this generation of THREDDS is to expand the reach and use of THREDDS in the established community of partners and users and to ensure its inter operatibility with data systems used in related geoscience communities.

Related sub goals for THREDDS include:

• Work within the context of DLESE Data Services (DDS) to aggressively pursue additional data provider sites, analysis and display tool builders, as well as content developers in the educational community.
• Engage educational module creators in building a large suite of instructional materials with embedded access to data and tools and garner their feedback on future enhancements to THREDDS.
• Expand THREDDS applicability to other disciplines in the environmental sciences community besides atmospheric, oceanic and climate studies.
• Promote working partnerships with the GIS community (OGC, ESRI, other GIS vendors, and GIS data providers sites) and with other organizations with data systems in the related fields,
• Construct a framework for bridging the differences among the "languages" of the disciplines. Beyond the challenge of integrating the data systems infrastructure lie the difficult issues related to the fact that each discipline has its own vocabulary, so mechanisms for both disciplinary ontology mediation and data access services are crucial.
• A number of sub goals related to interoperability, and technological infrastructure.

Assessment of the success of many of the technology related goals will be done through status updates and progress assessments at the annual technology meetings. The collaboration between THREDDS and CIRES will focus on the communities who are the users and contributors to THREDDS. Initially, the focus will be on the data providers and tool builders who are the current primary users of THREDDS. Tracking the extent to which these are expanded into targeted areas and using surveys and interviews with this group will allow us to assess how THREDDS is serving this group.

We will work with those who have developed existing educational modules (such as the VGEE-based curriculum used at West Chester University) to ground evaluation work with this group as this community of users exands. The workshops to be hosted by the Data Services Center group will provide a venue for pre and post assessment of the use of THREDDS in module development and for interviews and observation designed to assess the effectiveness of these workshops at promoting module development.

Instruments developed and validated as a result of the formative exploratory work with this community will be used in subsequent workshops by the Data Services Center. We anticipate working with alumni of these workshops to assess teaching practices by faculty and learning gains among students. This work will be informed by concurrent work funded through University Space Research Association, in which learning gains by undergraduate students using datasets and visualizations will be evaluated at University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Instruments and protocols developed to evaluate THREDDS will be made part of the DLESE Evaluation Toolkit project and will be shared with all NSDL projects.

THREDDS goals to develop more comprehensive and useful metadata and catalogs will be part of what is assessed as we observe educational module developers and students in using THREDDS. Other related technology goals will be part of the overall evaluation as they relate to the community related goals.

For more information please contact Susan Buhr.