[Esip-discovery] time for new challenges?

[Mattmann, Chris A (388J)]

Hi Chris,

On 12/20/12 6:41 AM, "Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)"
<christopher.s.lynnes at nasa.gov> wrote:


>
>To carry this just one step further, I had an email conversation with
>Faisal Hossain (author of the BAMS editorial), where he noted that other
>sites (JPL's DRIP) are also difficult to find with general terms in
>Google, and asked me if I could do anything about them too.  My initial
>response was "only so much" based on the theory that there's no reason
>the other sites should listen to me, they don't all participate in ESIP,
>blah, blah, blah. 
>
>But maybe that is a cop-out on my part.  Is there any reason why a third
>party (like, I don't know, ESIP?) can't put content out on the web
>referencing such portals / applications with rich metadata content, thus
>raising their profile in the Google search results? This might be a way
>to tackle the "long tail" of portal / application providers, without
>requiring too much of said long-tail, who by definition have limited
>resources.

So, what you're talking about is Hubs/Authorities, and there has been
decades worth of research into this in the Search Engines community, most
famously by Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University. See this paper from 1998
as a start:

J. Kleinberg.Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
<http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf>. Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM
Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998.


(this paper is linked from my syllabus)

>
>We have a couple ways we could do it, such as:
>o  data casting (collection level)
>o  ESIP Geoportal
>o  maybe even an ESIP OpenSearch reference implementation (no, does not
>exist yet, but might be useful on two counts)

Yep I'm starting to see this as something that fits the criteria of "Grand
Challenge". Also please don't take my commentary as "nay-sayer"-ing. I'm
all for it -- just trying to couch the discussion in my own (at least
blurred vision of) reality :)

Cheers,
Chris