Next: EXTERNAL RELATIONS AND
Up: Alexandria Design Review
Previous: The Second Alexandria
The third Alexandria Digital Library System Design Review was held
October 7-8, 1997. The purpose of this design review was to
(1) evaluate the ADL system architecture (e.g., does it meet our
objectives? is it scalable? is it distributable?), and (2) evaluate
the ADL architecture's current implementation (e.g., our COTS selections.)
This review did NOT address system requirements, user interface design
or usability, or ADL's information content. The intent was to focus on
the ADL system architecture, making the most of the reviewer's expertise
in large-scale, distributed information systems.
The following individuals participated in the ADL Design Review:
- Chaitanya Baru - San Diego Supercomputing Center
- Jim Davidson - Digital Cities
- Bob Evans - U. Miami
- Jim Gallager - Consultant to URI (DODS)
- Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert - Oracle
- Steve Marley - EOSL (EOSDIS)
- Bill Weibel - UCLA
Summary of Design Review comments/recommendations
The ADL project research focus should be on issues related to DL
interoperability (for example, ADL could contribute to Dublin
Core development by providing clarification of coordinate attribute).
Technical focus of ADL system development should be:
- Pursue spatial data indexing and result ranking (classes of
spatial data: point, etc)
- Query language semantics (Seek out complementary research on query
languages rather than reinvent wheel)
- Exploration of ``crawler model'' (i.e., ADL as geospatial
``AltaVista''
- Explore spatial extensions to text search, instead of reinventing
the wheel, work with existing vendors, such as the PLS group.
- Define success criteria for ADL fall release and subsequent releases.
Possible architectural trouble spots include:
- security
- performance
- distributability
- query language
Winning aspects of the architecture include:
- ``Search Buckets'' approach
- Asynchronous searches (buffering between client and server)
Attention needs to be paid to potential productization of ADL components,
including:
- -GUI
- map browser
- catalog
- gazetteer
- or potential replacement w/ vendor equivalents
DL scope/users should be more precisely defined in order to properly
evaluate the architectural components and extensibility, including:
- define the end product
- who are we optimizing for
- what is partners incentive to be involved
- prototyping is different from research - define scope of each
and intersections
Formalize prototype feedback and documentation:
- object design - document use cases
- use that info for a re-definition of requirements
- document external API
- formalize query semantics
Next: EXTERNAL RELATIONS AND
Up: Alexandria Design Review
Previous: The Second Alexandria
Terence R. Smith
Tue Jul 21 09:26:42 PDT 1998