Data Warehousing
SOA
Intellectual Capital
Cultural Memory Bank
Integrating Education & Technology
Using Web Services to Harvest Information ADEC Project: Developing Advanced Web Delivery of Rangelands and Natural Resources Information
As part of the Agricultural
Network Information Centre (AgNIC) national initiative, the
University of
Arizona has been part of a 6 year initiative to create and
develop the "Managing Rangelands"
website. Initially focusing on Arizona and the Western USA, the
website went regional when the University of Arizona formed the
Western Rangelands Partnership. The Partnership invited departments
and libraries from the Western land-grant universities to
participate. As the website developed a critical mass of information
resources related to rangelands management in the Western USA, it
became an important contributor to the AgNIC national portal. To
fully realize this potential, the
American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) funded a grant
(2002-45055-01425) that had, as one of its goal, the development of
an infrastructure to allow the national portal to harvest metadata
resources from the regional portal.
Precipice Development International was contracted to develop a web
services based middleware that would allow the transparent flow of
information between the 2 portals. We took an existing Microsoft
Access database, ported it over to Microsoft SQL Server, developed a
series of stored procedures to map the existing nomenclature to
Dublin Core metadata standards,
and built a generic web service that abstracted and exposed selected
query functionality. The AgNIC portal architect, Tim Lynch of
Cornell University, was then able to call our web service and
integrate the regional portals metadata resources into the national
portal seamlessly. Whenever a user enters the national portal and
does a search, our web service is being called upon to return any
relevant information, seamlessly and unbeknownst to the end user.
The power of web services, as a technology, is that it allows
loosely-coupled systems to work together. It is not a new idea in
computing science; COM, CORBA, etc. have been around for a long time
and have proved quite functional. However, web services removes some
of the complexity of these other solutions. In our case, we were
able to integrate Windows and UNIX based systems with very different
database systems and nomenclatures seamlessly. In fact, during our
work, we moved from Access to SQL Server and still not impact the
functioning of the national portal.
Participating Organizations:
University of Arizona
Office of Arid Land Studies
School of Natural Resources
University Library
Cooperative Extension
Educational Communications and Technology
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Colorado State University
Kansas State University
Montana State University
New Mexico State University
Oregon State University
Texas A&M University
U of California Davis & Berkeley
University of Idaho
University of Nebraska Lincoln
University of Nevada
University of Wyoming
Utah State University
Washington State University
Supporting Organisations:
Society for Range Management
The Noble Foundation, Oklahoma
USDA, National Agricultural Library
USDA, Natural Resource Conservation Service
Council for Agricultural Research, Extension and Teaching (Western
Region)