TOOLS SUMMARY

Tango & WebWisdom

TANGO is a Java-based web collaboratory developed at Syracuse (with
funding from Rome Laboratories). It is implemented with standard
Internet technologies and protocols, and runs inside an ordinary
Netscape browser window (support for other browsers is in
progress). TANGO delivers real-time multimedia content in an
authentic, two-way interactive format.

TANGO was originally designed to support collaborative workgroups,
though synchronous distance education, which can be thought of as a
particular kind of collaborative workgroup, has become one of the key
application areas of the system.

The primary TANGO window is called the control application (CA). From
the CA, participants have access to many tools, including:
* SharedBrowser, a special-purpose browser window that "pushes" Web
  documents onto remote client workstations; 
* WebWisdom, a presentation environment for over lectures foilsets and
  similar materials; 
* WhiteBoard, for interactive text and graphics display; 
* 2D and 3D Chat tools; 
* RaiseHand, a tool used to signal one's desire to ask a question; 
* BuenaVista, for two-way streaming audio and video. 

WebWisdom is a tool for showing lecture slides (or foils). Each foil
may have an "addon", which is a link (or links) to supporting material
such as online documentation or example programs.  WebWisdom was
originally developed for use in courses at Syracuse University, and
was later interfaced with Tango to support the same kind of
presentations to distant audiences.

Tango and WebWisdom were deployed at the CEWES MSRC and at Jackson
State University for use in the joint Syracuse-Jackson State distance
education work begin in Year 2.  It was first used to present a
three-day training class in the Java programming language
simultaneously to a local audience at the CEWES MSRC and a remote
audience at JSU.  Shortly thereafter, Tango and WebWisdom were used by
instructors located in Syracuse to deliver full-semester academic
credit courses to students located at JSU in the Fall 1997 and Spring
1998 terms.  The effort has been quite successful, and with the
benefit of the experience gained, expanded efforts are planned,
including graduate-level course offerings, additional recipient sites,
and offering PET training classes through this mechanism.

A separate effort at Syracuse focused on enhancing Tango to better
support collaborative software development, remote consulting.  In
this project, capabilities for shared browsing and modification of
source code, shared debugging, and basic shared on-line computer
access were added to Tango.  The new tools will be available at CEWES
shortly, in conjunction with a training class to introduce CEWES MSRC
users to the Tango collaborative system.

Grid Generation Search Engine

The ease of publishing information on the world-wide web has rapidly
made it an invaluable source of information on a great many topics.
Its popularity, and the resulting growth curve, has, at the same time,
made it harder to sift the desired information out of the rapidly
growing flood of data.  Topical search engines are one way of dealing
with this flood of information.  By starting from set of "master
documents", perhaps specifically identified by an expert in a given
knowledge domain, it is possible to construct a specialized search
engine which focuses on resources in that domain.  This provides
researchers with a higher "signal-to-noise" ratio in searching for
information focused on particular knowledge domain.  Using a search
engine framework previously developed at Syracuse University, this
idea has been applied to produce a specialized resource on the topic of
computational grid generation.  This resource has the potential to
benefit researchers in the various "grid-based" computational
technology areas, while clearly the concept can, and will, be applied
to a variety of knowledge domains.

CEWES MSRC Search Engine

The search engine framework previously developed at Syracuse has also
been used to deploy a search engine facility for the CEWES MSRC web
site (which includes the PET web site).  Based on a relational
database system for speed, the search engine can handle complex
queries and return relevant documents with search terms highlighted to
aid use.

Web Site Management System

Web sites, such as those run by the CEWES MSRC and the PET program,
offer a sizable amount of information, with a large number of
individuals contributing content.  In addition, some of the
information is time sensitive, as well as being subject to security
review prior to release and other such concerns.  The Web Site
Management System is designed to the routine operation of such a site
by providing a famework for the management not only of the information
content itself, but also the "metadata" (i.e. author, revision date,
review status, etc.) which is not easily maintained or used in a
traditionally-maintained web site.  The Web Site Management System is
currently under development, and shares the same database used to
support the CEWES MSRC Search Engine.  The plan is to transition the
system to CEWES once appropriate infrastructure is in place.