Greg Janee and Terence R. Smith
University of California, Santa Barbara
The Alexandria Digital Library Project is a consortium of researchers, engineers, and educators, spanning the academic, public, and private sectors, working to develop distributed digital libraries for heterogeneous georeferenced information. "Distributed" means that a library's components may be spread across the Internet, as well as coexisting on a single desktop. "Heterogeneous" means that a library may contain multiple types of digital information, including non-traditional items such as remotely-sensed imagery, executable models, and multimedia instructional materials. "Georeferenced" means that, whenever possible, each item in a library is associated with one or more regions ("footprints") on the Earth's surface.
In this talk we will review the project's goals and give an overview of the ADEPT distributed architecture. We will also delve into some technical problems the project has worked on, specifically in the areas of metadata interoperability (the ADEPT bucket framework), collection discovery (the use of Euler histograms in spatial browsing), and query transformation (the ADEPT database abstraction layer). We will also discuss current work on developing and applying a special set of services to support concept-based education, and possibly research, in the sciences.