Portal Infrastructure for Education and Computing from Palm to Desktop 

As part of the Alliance Portal activity, we have rethought our approach to
portals to include lessons from previous work by us and others. We intend
prototypes of several aspects of this in september and integrated functional
systems by May 01. This system will be tested on EOT activities and on
computational science applications. We have assembled a good team
for this work with a dozen PhD graduate students working in the general area of portals.
Summary of our ideas can be found in:
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/generalportalmay00/erdcportal.html
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/collabcompmay00/collabviz.html (has detailed
critique of collaboration approaches)
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/wapmay00/wap-assessment.html (Appendix B)

Essential features of our approach are
1) Use of a "personal server" whose interfaces are defined in portalML and define user
   view of system. This controls user customization, layout etc,
2) The personal server(s) communicate with conventional middle tier where "resourceML"
   (as defined by IMS/ADL SCORM for education and Grid Forum for computing) defines objects
3) Personal server includes much of the code that we put in browser for our older systems
   Tango and Gateway. The new architecture produces a more robust system and makes it easier to drive
   different client side renderings (desktop, palmtop or Cave (PowerWall at FSU)) from
   a common server with essential logic
4) A federated (client and server side) XML-based event system with backend database store
   supporting both asynchronous access and synchronous multicast of events between clients. 
   This leads to robust support of synchronous and asynchronous colaboration.
5) Designed to allow integration of outside modules such as Access Grid or RealNetwork
   audio-video conferencing technology.

Deliverables are
December 01: Initial design of GXOS -- XML Event Structure
May 01: Workshop to Discuss implications of Handheld and Wireless Technology on 
              High Performance Computing. This will help us design the PDA
              Interface to our portal
May 01:     Integrated system supporting PDA access. 
			The Access Grid will be used for conferencing
Ongoing		Interactions with Grid Forum