CAREER: Distributed Cooperative Digital Archives for Scientific and Geospatial Data

在过去几年中，许多数据密集型应用程序对存储、搜索、查询和检索大规模复杂数据（如医疗或卫星图像、地理和科学数据）提出了新的挑战。随着Internet和万维网（WWW）的日益普及，使这些数据能够通过Internet访问的需求迅速增长。分布式协作数字档案（DCDA）研究建立了一个框架，使这些科学和地理空间数据能够在互联网上发现和检索。这种方法是使独立数据档案的集合能够分担负载，以提高它们的集体系统性能，同时允许个别档案保持在相应数据生产者的控制之下。这种方法还集成了数据库支持和web服务器，以提供可扩展的数据检索和可索引性。本研究解决的问题包括：web文档的动态迁移和复制、web文档的数据库支持自动化处理、快速web-数据库连接以及大规模科学和地理空间数据的web支持集群。这项研究的结果包括新的算法、软件工具和原型系统实现，在数据传输、可搜索性和服务器的可扩展性方面有显著的性能改进。本研究的教育目标是将研究任务整合到网页/网际网路资讯处理的教学课程中，以支持学生有意义的研究训练。此外，我们亦致力发展及加强以项目为导向的学习及网络教学环境，以激发学生自主学习及解决问题的能力。

During the past few years, many data-intensive applications have posed new challenges concerning storing, searching, querying, and retrieving large-scale complex data such as medical or satellite imagery, geographical and scientific data. With the increasing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), there is a fast growing need to make such data accessible through the Internet. The Distributed Cooperative Digital Archives (DCDA) research builds a framework to make such scientific and geospatial data discoverable and retrievable on the Internet. This approach is to enable a collection of independent data archives to share the load in order to enhance their collective system performance, while allowing individual archives to remain under the control of the corresponding data producers. This approach also integrates database support and web servers to provide scalable data retrieval and indexability. The issues being addressed in this research include: dynamic migration and replication of web documents, automated processing of web documents for database support, fast web-database connection, and web-enabled declustering of large-scale scientific and geospatial data. The results of this research include new algorithms, software tools and prototype system implementations for significant performance improvements in data delivery, searchability and scalability of servers. The educational goal of this research is to integrate the research tasks into a curriculum for teaching Web/Internet information processing to support meaningful research training for students. Additional effort is to develop and strengthen project-driven learning and web-enabled teaching environment to stimulate students' motivation for self-learning and problem solving skills.