The WWW Prototype of the Alexandria Digital Library

Abstract

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is focussed on providing broad access to distributed collections of spatially-indexed information. ADL has a four-component architecture involving collections, catalog, interfaces, and ingest facilities. The first stage in the construction of ADL resulted in the design and implementation of a rapid prototype (RP) system. The second stage, which is described in this paper, involves an expansion of the functionality of the RP and its extension to the World-Wide-Web (WWW). We describe issues arising in each of the components of the architecture in extending the library to WWW as well as our current resolution of these issues. We also discuss an extension of the class of supportable queries to include simple, contentbased queries involving geographic "features" and image textures. The metadata of ADL has been extended to include gazetteer information supporting the first class of extended queries. We discuss image processing and parallel computing sup..