CAREER: Distributed Cooperative Digital Archives for Scientific and Geospatial Data

在过去的几年中，许多数据密集型应用程序提出了新的挑战，涉及存储，搜索，查询和检索大规模的复杂数据，如医疗或卫星图像，地理和科学数据。随着互联网和万维网（WWW）的日益普及，通过互联网访问这些数据的需求快速增长。分布式合作数字档案馆（DCDA）的研究建立了一个框架，使这样的科学和地理空间数据在互联网上可共享和检索。这种做法是为了使一组独立的数据档案能够分担负荷，以提高其集体系统的性能，同时允许个别档案继续处于相应的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，以提供可伸缩的数据检索和索引能力。在这项研究中正在解决的问题包括：动态迁移和复制的Web文档，自动处理Web文档的数据库支持，快速的Web数据库连接，和Web使能的大规模科学和地理空间数据的分布。这项研究的结果包括新的算法，软件工具和原型系统的实现显着的性能改进的数据传输，搜索能力和服务器的可扩展性。本研究的教育目标是将研究任务整合到Web/Internet信息处理教学课程中，以支持学生进行有意义的研究培训。此外，我们亦致力发展和加强专题研习和网上教学环境，以激发学生自学的动力和解决问题的技巧。

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.