The poster presentation will demonstrate The Heart Health in Canada CD-ROM, which is now available to the general public through The Canadian Heart Health Database Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, for the cost of postage and handling. The CD-ROM includes DAIS metadata and access software for 150 public domain data sets in Canada. It contains:

(1) The complete Canadian Heart Health Database, containing interview and clinical data on blood pressure, blood lipids, anthropometry, lifestyle behaviours and knowledge and awareness of cardiovascular disease and associated risk factors. The data were gathered by public health workers in each Canadian province with technical advice from Health Canada and Statistics Canada to yield a nationally representative sample of 18 689 individuals aged 18-74 years.

(2) The DAIS Data and Information System, software and metadata that can be installed on your computer or server to provide desktop access to the Heart Health Database and companion resources. DAIS is a platform that helps you stage, access and integrate the data, information, and knowledge products from the Canadian Heart Health Initiative with those of many other related information sources and documents, such as the National Population Health Survey and the recent Report on the Health of Canadians. DAIS puts the database to work for you by letting you search, browse through, access and manage all of these resources from the perspective of your information and research needs.

(3) An extended metabase which provides access to approximately 150 public domain data sets from 75 key Canadian health, social, demographic and economic survey and census programs of relevance to heart health and related population health research and teaching activities. You can find comparable measures, create your own custom libraries of questions, and, if you have purchased or can link to a licensed copy of the data, pull extracts and custom analyses from these surveys as well.

The World Development Indicators, a data base available on CD-Rom from The World Bank, present an effective resource for teaching global political economy. Students learn the importance of economic indicators at the same time they learn spreadsheet skills by manipulating the data. Each student is assigned a country, creating a sense of identity with the country and encouraging the student to learn in more detail about its economy, politics and culture. Students can extend their knowledge using the Internet by searching for more recent data and by learning about current events from newspapers and magazines on-line.

The framework of country analysis provides structure to the course. Students learn about national strategies by discussing current events and by researching their countries through the Internet. They learn to evaluate economic performance relative to those strategies through problem sets, case discussions and analysis of the World Development Indicators. They place a country in its global context by analyzing the Indicators and updating the results through the Internet.

The World Development Indicators can be used to teach important principles of macroeconomics such as national income accounting, real versus nominal effects, money supply growth, purchasing power parity, balance of payments, the relation between saving and investment, and currency values. By applying these concepts in a real-world setting, students learn about the competitive advantages of nations, the sources of economic growth, the relation between political freedom and economic growth and the competitive environment in a variety of countries.

The approach has been very successful with students because they appreciate learning economics through application to actual situations. The approach also integrates well with other courses in the curriculum by providing students with the background necessary for evaluating global competition.

ISLAND is a system of programs developed at UBC that will allow for the easy extraction of numeric data from data files of all kinds. ISLAND provides a common (or not so common, if desired) WWW interface to widely available data extraction engines.

There are a number of efforts ongoing at various institutions to provide seamless access to numeric data files via the World Wide Web. So far, most of the WWW interfaces are primitive in nature and lacking ease-of-use and scalability, both for the end user and the staff that have to maintain them. ISLAND is a different approach, one that makes the end-user's access to data and documentation easy to follow and understand, as well as making the system maintainer's job straight-forward. The kinds of data files being targetted initially are the kind of numeric data files held in various data libraries and archives around the world.

The ISLAND system is flexible in that it is language independent and useful for both teaching and research. Almost all facets of the system, from screen presentation to where files exist, are controllable by a non-technical "system maintainer". Most often, researchers wish to download an entire data set for processing on their machine. ISLAND makes this unnecessary, but does not prevent it in any way. Students on the other hand, most often wish to make subsets of the original data file, and this is easy and quick with ISLAND. Separate forms can be writen for beginning and advanced users. Documentation can be provided at any level of detail desired, on an "as needed" basis, giving just-in-time documentation, when the user needs it.

I will demonstrate the ISLAND system, and show how it's all put together. I will explain in detail how the system is installed, and what all is needed in order to get up and running with ISLAND.

Come see the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey CD-ROM product, featuring Beyond 20/20.

Come see a preview of the Beyond 20/20 Browser, Version 5.0.

This poster session will demonstrate the DRC's web-based data retrieval system. A unique Perl script interacts with SAS programs to create a generic form into which data sets can be mounted. This has resulted in a dramatic decrease in time required to mount individual data sets.

It also creates an easy-to-use standard format of scrolling menu boxes for data retrieval by users, while maintaining raw data files for the more advanced researchers. Subsets are created by point and click options, which can then be downloaded and taken away by users for manipulation in a variety of software packages.

The University of Delaware initiated a collaboration with local and state agencies to promote the development of a geospatial data framework and infrastructure within Delaware. As a first step, we created a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) National Data Clearinghouse Node to serve Delaware-specific geospatial metadata. This allows the metadata to be Internet-accessible by supporting and extending two key national-level standards in the US: the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata content standards and the CNIDR-developed software for Z39.50 searching with WWW- based search and retrieval interfaces. Users may specify spatial, temporal or other search criteria through Javascript-enhanced HTML forms and Java-based search interfaces. Several metadata servers can be searched concurrently and a consolidated list of titles and URLs are returned. Links lead to full metadata entries, with embedded links to browse graphics, data files and access information. We are also developing a Web-based form for remote entry and updating of metadata. This form will be especially important for the many small agencies with budgetary or organization limitations regarding metadata development and data sharing. It will also simplify the creation of standardized metadata content The project's current function is to encourage statewide data-sharing and to serve as a prototype for the State's academic and non- academic data producers. The working prototype provides us with a persuasive tool in our discussions with State organizational, legislative and strategic planning bodies.

The presentation will demonstrate the software and describe the overall design of the overall FGDC initiative and our experiences in its implementation.

BoardView is a service of The Conference Board (TCB), the leading corporate membership organization. BoardView offers highly intuitive software for storing, retrieving, and viewing data, plus economic commentary from TCB experts and direct telephone access to economists for consultation. There are over 4,300 data series covering the US, regions, states and 54 countries including TCB proprietary data, such as Consumer and Business Confidence, Leading Economic Indicators, and economic forecasts. Data updates are provided via the Internet or direct dial-up to TCB. Use BoardView to store key company and industry indicators to create a centralized source for vital information. New executive-oriented features make BoardView an ideal tool for senior managers who value economic information in the decision-making process.