The Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) Project is developing services to support the construction and use of “learning spaces”, or personalized DLs of geospatially referenced information and services, with applications in science education. The project is focused on helping students attain deep understanding (concept development) and scientific reasoning skills (hypothesis development.) In relation to its use of concepts and hypotheses for organizing and using collections and services in ways that support such student learning activities, we describe four Project activities focused on developing: (1) use scenarios to inform the ADEPT specification process; (2) both the concept of learning spaces (LSs) and instances of LSs; (3) clients for LSs; and (4) meta-information environments, including topic maps, that support LSs.