Activities in Common Portal Architecture
1) Experience with WebFlow and Gateway
   These are the base portal technologies developed by NPAC and being applied
   in several application areas. These include Chemistry for DoD, Nanomaterials
   for NCSA and Earthquake Science in collaboration with NPACI and NCSA Partner Boston University.
   In these activities, we have demonstrated the key concepts of portals. 
   They were last reported at NCSA Portal Meeting October 22 99:
   http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/npacfullportaloct99/
   and at Computing Portals meeting attached to ISCOPE December 7 99
   (Presentations available at this site or on request)
   We also have written material up as a book chapter to be published
   by the American Geophysical Union. This work was summarized as an
   invited presentation at an AGU Meeting December 13 99 in San Francisco.
   In general our prototypes demonstrate use of two (client-server, server-service)
   XML interfaces; visual dataflow program composition; use of CORBA to
   manipulate proxies and so get high performance; Kerberos security; integration
   with Globus; linkage of databases and cross-platform systems(NT and UNIX).
   An excellent Student Erol Akarsu described much of this work in his thesis
   defended September 99.
   Additional important links are:
   http://www.osc.edu/~kenf/theGateway/
   http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/haupt/WebFlow/papers/HPDC-8/ (HPDC8 Presentation
   August 13 99)
   Our Current Software can be downloaded from:
   http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/haupt/WebFlow/menu.html

2) Architecture work
   Here we have proposed an approach to portals based on XML used to define
   layout; collaborative structure as well as basic component objects and services.
   They were described at "XML Developers Conference" at Montreal August 19-20 99
   http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/montrealxmlaug99/index.html and several other
   talks mentioned in 1) above. At NCSA Portal Meeting, we discussed these ideas in:
   http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/offbeatxmloct99/
   We also noted the importance of a distributed event service federating events
   across all tiers (clients and servers) as the basic infrastructure.
   We have used TangoInteractive as an example of collaboration services in such
   a system and reviewed several different approaches to collaborative visualization which we
   will present as a report. This includes some modest experiments with an
   in-house Java3D system SV2.