Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
The term "scalability" has specific connotations in Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) that conventionally relate to monitoring and predicting
growth of geographic phenomena. A family of computational
models has been developed to predict changes in structure associated
with changes in size. These models have been applied in physical science,
social science, and cartographic science to study growth and may
assist in monitoring the growth of digital libraries as well. As the size
of the digital library increases, challenges for data organization and
collection maintenance tasks will also increase. However, the rate of
increase may not be in linear proportion to library size. At some critical
scales, existing procedures will fail and new procedures must be
implemented to accommodate further growth. Allometric principles
may be applied to estimate these critical scales. Three aspects (data
volume, indexing, and metadata recordation) will be discussed in the
context of implementing and maintaining a digital library containing
spatial data archives distributed across local or global electronic networks.published or submitted for publicatio
