Funding Requests Under Consideration

There are a variety of funding requests either under consideration or under development.

• Barbara Buttenfield is involved in the CU Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site on campus, whose focus on Arctic and Alpine Environments has generated several years of digital environmental data. Results of a pilot study on metadata granularity were promising enough that further collaboration with the Colorado ADL Team on metadata and scale has been included in the LTER renewal proposal (submitted January 1998).

• Ron Dolin is the P.I. on a current NSF Proposal titled, ``Pharos: A Scalable Distributed Architecture for Locating Heterogeneous Information Sources''

  Pharos is a scalable distributed architecture for locating heterogeneous information sources. The system incorporates a hierarchical metadata structure into a multi-level retrieval system. Queries are resolved through an iterative decision-making process. The first step retrieves coarse-grain metadata, about all sources, stored on local, massively replicated, high-level servers. Further steps retrieve more detailed metadata, about a greatly reduced set of sources, stored on remote, topic-based mid-level servers. We describe the structure, distribution, and retrieval of the metadata in Pharos to enable users to locate desirable informationsources over the Internet. A preliminary feasibility study establishes the viability of the Pharos architecture. A description of a working prototype that extracts collection metadata using automated classification is described next. The various components described in this proposal will be integrated to develop a full implementation of the Pharos architecture.

• Digital Library test Suite (CNRI) $300,00.

• GeoWorlds (ISI) $144,000.

• Ubiquitous Access to Scientific Knowledge Workbenches (NSF) $951,666.