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.