Savas Parastaditis gave a talk on his White Dwarfs application and the WS-GAF work he did while at University of Newcastle. He had the worst timeslot of anyone in the workshop: It was after dinner and we were all getting pretty tired. The workshop had started over 12 hours before (and aside from a few breaks) was packed with content. Anyway, Savas did a good job with his talk. The White Dwarfs application is an interesting application that brought together existing data to help astronomers search for white dwarfs.
I chatted with him for a few minutes about MEST: like many, I am eager to read his coming paper (or book?). He has gotten me thinking about a mechanism that we use to simulate MEST-like behavior in a world where the clients are not services (nor are they assumed to be reachable from the service). Unfortunately, I can only guess if such methods for simulation are MEST- or XEST (i.e., something else altogether). I will blog my thoughts on this and see what Savas as to say about it.
I had been in contact with the Savas before eScience and was happy to finally meet him: he is a real nice guy.