There are two main efforts involved in the development of the Interspace Analysis Environment which provides the user interface for the Interspace services.

The first is ISTD, the Interspace Services Technology Demonstrator. It provides a framework for the rapid construction and integration of browsers and capabilities so that we may quickly build user interfaces to support the test and evaluation of Interspace Service elements. Most applications built using the ISTD frameworks will have only a limited user base, typically restricted to members of our lab. Within the boundaries of our lab we have direct access to Interspace databases over high speed networks, and this allows us to concentrate on developing interactive capabilities rather than be concerned with client/server issues.

Capabilities prototyped within ISTD may be migrated into the second main effort. This effort is concerned with providing a walk-up user interface for the analysis environment that can work effectively while having elements widely distributed over the Internet. Primary concerns include walk-up usability and effective distribution of computational load among the analysis environment elements distributed throughout the Internet. Elements would be interconnected via network connections having widely varying bandwidth, from very fast ( gigabits/sec ) to very slow (28.8Kbaud modem ). Users will be knowledge domain experts who are initially unfamiliar with Interspace services.