The NSDL Science and Math Informal Educators (SMILE) Pathway is a partnership of UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, the Exploratorium, New York Hall of Science, Science Museum of Minnesota, Children's Museum of Houston, and the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC). SMILE and TNS developers worked together to integrate a geospatial bounding box tool into the NCS to enable SMILE to integrate geospatial data into their collections. The bounding box tool is activated from the NCS, and with the help of Google maps, allows the user to specify four corners of a rectangle on the earth's surface. Latitude and longitude data for the four corners are then automatically inserted in the appropriate fields of the NCS metadata editor.

This collaborative development effort not only helped the SMILE project to more easily catalog geo-spatial information, but it also resulted in a general-purpose "inputHelper" mechanism that will benefit the NSDL community by allowing other open source third-party editing tools to be added to the NCore platform in a similar fashion.