CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) plans

In years 2-3 of this NSF-funded effort, the VSTO collaboration will continue to engage the solar-terrestrial science and education community to further refine and develop important usage cases, and to build critical connections to other projects and activities. The development of the VSTO ontology will continue and is expected to not only serve as a foundation for VSTO core development, but also to begin serving in a feedback loop that helps to advance ontology development in related areas and overarching knowledge spaces (e.g. NASA's SWEET effort). We expect to leverage this effort in a wide variety of ways as the project develops.

VSTO will provide live demonstrations of early portal-based visualization and data access prototypes at the annual AGU conference as well as other events. We will also be tracking, evaluating, and integrating other technologies needed by the project, such as NMI packages and so forth. Following a spiral model of development, the new usage cases will generate new requirements, and a cyclic pattern of new prototypes and functionality will be developed, ultimately providing a framework, design patterns, and interfaces that can be deployed and evaluated in the context of other scientific areas such as climate and weather.