Conferences & Presentations

The Integration of THREDDS (Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services) Technology into My World GIS

David A. Smith, Daniel C. Edelson, and Eric Russell
National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting
November 15-17, 2004, Chicago, IL

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Poster Abstract

My World GIS is a geographic information system (GIS) designed specifically for use in educational settings. Its intended audience is middle school through college geosciences and geography courses where investigations involving geographic data can support the learning goals of the course. My World is designed to meet the needs of students and teachers and the constraints of educational settings in mind. It combines the power of a full-featured GIS environment with the support and structure required by novice users in an educational environment. My World is being developed by GEODE (Geographic Data for Education) Initiative at Northwestern, drawing on more than a decade of research on the design of data visualization and analysis environments for inquiry-based learning in the geosciences. Currently we are engaged in an integrated program of user studies and software development to extend and improve the software.

The THREDDS 2nd generation grant is supporting the integration of THREDDS tools into My World. Because My World is the only full-featured GIS environment designed specifically for use in educational settings, it is a logical client for THREDDS. It also will provide as a testbed for exploring how to extend the THREDDS architecture to the full range of GIS data types (grids, polygons, polylines, and points) and file formats. Currently, My World is able to read THREDDS catalogs and access gridded data from remote servers taking advantage of THREDDS middleware to convert the data to a My World-compatible file format.