THE NEXT GENERATION OF ONLINE PETROLOGIC RESEARCH AND TEACHING TOOLS: INTEGRATING AND EXTENDING PETROLOGIC DATA SYSTEMS SUCH AS AADS WITH XML WEB SERVICES

Advances in information and Web technologies have made available an increasing number of online data sets to Earth science researchers and educators. Like most disciplines, petrology has seen the development of online geochemical databases. Geochemical data for oceanic ridge samples are available from RIDGE PetDB, oceanic island data from GEOROC and Aleutian arc data from AADS (Aleutian Arc Data System - http://www.gg.uwyo.edu/aleutians/). These petrologic systems are primarily user-driven with limited functionality. Although users can create their own datasets using custom queries, they cannot work with these datasets online. Rather, they must download the data for use in applications hosted on their desktops. In the near future, emerging open-standards-based technologies will provide researchers and educators with new online tools that will allow them to easily manipulate and integrate data from multiple online sources. In essence, these tools will be Web-based applications designed for specific petrologic purposes and that can communicate with other Web-based applications and databases. Today, isolated desktop and Web-based applications plot data on different geochemical plots, determine intensive crystallization parameters from phase equilibria, calculate ages from isotopic data and perform major, trace and rare element petrologic modeling. Using today’s techniques, extending a petrologic database, such as AADS, to include these functionalities would require extensive application redesign and development, a costly initiative requiring significant labor. In the near future, independent parties or individuals in the scientific community with expertise in a particular field will be able to create and host XML Web Services, i.e. programmable Web-based applications. This paradigm shift in Internet software development has several advantages: individuals with special interests and skills contribute components thereby building ever larger data systems, use of these underlying components is seamless to the user, large development teams are not necessary to create all-encompassing, monolithic Web applications, and researchers and teachers at small institutions with limited technology abilities have access to the most current data and cutting edge tools.