Objective

A distributed digital library for geographically referenced material, including maps, satellite images, aerial photographs, specialized documents (such as gazetteers) and all associated metadata.

Approach

Develop components of the digital library: collections, catalogs, interfaces and ingest facilities.

Extend current catalog and metadata models.

Emphasize standards (e.g. USMARC & FGDC).

Provide Internet access for many users, which implies interoperability.

Employ incremental and evolutionary design and implementation.

Developed rapid prototype, followed by a Web-based implementation (which includes distribut,ed storage and catalog components and permits simple content-based search)

Use image-processing techniques to cope with bandwidth and storage limitations.

Employ parallel-processing techniques to address performance issues.

Accomplishments

The Alexandria project has developed a geographic information testbed.

Significance

This project is investigating real implementation issues in design of large tera-byte sized earth observation imagery libraries.

Plans

This agreement expires in Fiscal Year 1998.

Point of Contact

Dr. Terrence Smith
Dept. of Computer Science
Univ. of CA, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3160
Phone: 805-893-2966
Email: smithtr@cs.ucsb.edu