The project is expected to make many significant contributions to research in several areas. The interdisciplinary nature of the research team and the research area make the probability of interesting findings relatively high. In general, we expect these contributions to take the form of publishable solutions to the Research issues items that appear the end of each major section of the proposal. In the area of computer science and image processing, publishable research results are expected in relation to the interface, catalogue, ingest, distributed database, and network components of the system, as well as in the area of parallel and high-performance computing. Many of these results will be specific to the input, storage, processing, retrieval and display of spatially-indexed information. We also expect publishable research results from studies of the users in terms of their requirements and their responses to the system. The research will also lead to results concerning unsolved legal and economic issues relating to the use of electronic libraries.
We also expect to make major accomplishments in the area of library applications. In particular, that our experiences in designing, developing and evaluating the testbed will lead to advances in our understanding of how to build truly distributed digital libraries that integrate text and spatially-indexed information. Such libraries have potential significance in large numbers of applications, from basic science to commercial ventures.
An important accomplishment of the project will be transfer of university research results in a relatively rapid manner to a variety of commercial applications.
Finally, we also believe that it is quite likely that the testbed that we build will be useable on a routine basis in a library setting.