The Evolution of the Alexandria Digital Library
James Frew
UC Santa Barbara
Abstract
The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is one of 6 projects funded by the
NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative. Since 1994, ADL Project
has developed three prototype digital libraries for georeferenced
information, evolving from a GIS-based system, to a simple World Wide
Web interface, and finally to a a three-tier client-server architecture
whose middleware layer presents a single set of interfaces to multiple
heterogeneous servers. These standard interfaces, all of which are
implemented in HTTP, support session management, collection discovery
and evaluation, metadata searching, metadata retrieval, and online
holdings retrieval. An XML-based metadata encoding scheme, a simple
boolean query language, and standalone Java client have also been
developed.
This talk will describe ADL's evolving architecture; demonstrate some of
its past and current capabilities, and discuss the tradeoffs made and
lessons learned in each successive implementation.
Bio
James Frew, ADL co-PI and
development team leader, is an Assistant Professor in UCSB's Donald Bren
School of Environmental Science and Management. He is interested in all
aspects of Earth science information management and processing. He
received his Ph.D. in Geography from UCSB in 1990. He has served as
both Manager and Acting Director of UCSB's Institute for Computational
Earth System Science, and as Associate Director of UC's multi-campus
Sequoia 2000 Project. In addition to ADL, Frew is currently involved in
NASA's prototype Earth Science Information Provider (ESIP) Federation,
as both an ESIP project leader and vice-chairman of the Federation.