The Alexandria Digital Library and the alexandria digital earth prototype

The Alexandria Digital Library, together with its follow-on -- the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project -- is one of the flagship projects of the NSF/NASA/ Digital Library Initiative Uniquely among these projects, ADL is a georeferenced library i.e. a library in which the principal mode of access to information is by specifying the location of the information on the surface of the Earth. The most immediate application of this technology is in support of a library of maps, aerial photographs and remote sensing images, and ADL is now run as an operational service by UCSB's Map and Image Library, one of the largest such libraries in the US.But the longer term objective is to provide georeferenced search as an alternative way of accessing conventional libraries i.e. libraries of textual information With the aid of a natural language parser and the ADL gazetteer, the locations (lat, long) of places named in a text can be identified This functionality offers a quantum leap in information retrieval performance in the many cases in which locational information is involved For example, it becomes possible to discover documents about California, even if the name California" does not appear explicitly in the text. It also offers a foundation technology for the concept of the Digital Earth able to answer questions such as: "What information do you have about this place?The primary focus of the ADEPT project, however, is on the development of digital learning environments (DLEs) for undergraduate education There are two particularly innovative strands to this research: first the use of digital library technology to provide curated learning and teaching resources for the DLEs; and second a pedagogic approach based on an explicit concept model of the chosen field of study ADEPT has naturally chosen Geography as the experimental field of study but the approach is quite general and could be applied to any other field A first course using this approach was given at UCSB in Fall 2003".