Chips n Salsa Project

The Chips-N-Salsa project is a multinational portal/gateway project for education, research and publishing, with several nodes across Mexico, Central and South America as well as the Iberian peninsula. The system includes several cutting edge technologies including an Open Archives Protocol implementation in the system enabling the harvesting of metadata among different learning objects repositories. This also includes Ariadne European Union Learning Object repositories implemented in some of the member institutions. The harvester is tightly integrated into the multiple indexing system in the core of the Chipsnsalsa engine, and it also exposes the information collected through metadata reports, to indexers over the world. This approach overcomes the need for common Databases or even the same metadata implementations, creating a truly distributed community and a democratic fast and accurate access to information.

The Ibero-American Science & Technology Consortium (ISTEC) "Chips-N-Salsa" portal /gateway project addresses the information isolation and non interconnection frequently found on online education portals by integrating content into structured but flexible information maps and contextual databases. It enables students to take advantage of the content, and turns the WEB portal/gateway into a diligent information provider that orders the information optimally for their particular needs. Similarly, it enables researchers to have specific and accurate access to the most relevant information in their research, while establishing knowledge bases, real-time peer review, and repositories for future work and long haul ongoing projects. It also provides them with virtual labs and real-time online publishing. Double indexing with full text index and metadata information, and relating the content in a common structured metadata organization

The ChipsnSalsa Portal project is currently sponsored by Microsoft corporation , Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and has been the subject to 4 published papers including a first prize award winning paper presented at the MAES international convention in 2003. Several presentations for the product have been made in several international conferences including the AISTI meeting , The ICEEE international Symposium in the UK , The INAOE Digital Libraries Symposium in Mexico and the ISTEC general assembly. Several institution s have expressed interest in the product and have had private screenings of the beta versions, including: Los Alamos National Lab, The Santa Fe Institute, NASA, The Government of Puebla - Mexico and several other universities in Latin America.