NPAC Focused Effort Proposal for CEWES

Building Web-based Virtual Library with Intelligent Database Support

Vision

A Web interface presents to geographically located users with a GUI-uniform, platform-independent, location-transparent and multimedia-enabled user interface and working environment to access to both centralized and distributed information resources. The ever-growing WWW information space, mostly represented by HTML document repositories on Web servers, has become a non-structured distributed database resource. However, most traditional information resources are historically stored in and managed by legacy database systems. Accessing to these database systems usually requires proprietary client software and hardware. Integrating existing legacy information systems with the emerging WWW technology makes it possible for a vast amount of well-established information content and invaluable resources to be available in the new WWW information space.

Project Description and Value CEWES

While WWW document repository becomes an increasingly popular mechnism for information provider to author and publish new static and free-text HTML documents, the majority of useful information entities exist in various distributed and hetergeneous databases. Relational database management system still represents the most widely used information technology in computer applications and information processing. Seamlessly linking long-established legacy and domain-specific database systems into WWW becomes an most important and critical mission to many organizations that are in the process of migrating their services and bussiness into the next generation of 'network-centric' computing environment. We believe that this is equally important/critical to DOD MSRC, in particular CEWES center, given the situation that most CEWES users are remote users. Information sharing and discovery via WWW requires bridging traditional database technoogy into the emerging Internet/WWW domain. This project will develop advanced information systems that provide a Web-based virtual library at CEWES to support information discovery and search for general CEWES users in their day-to-day work. This is achived by coupling relational database support as backend intelligent information servers into the WWW for information assembling, searching, filtering and analysing.

By investigating the existing information systems and their applications at CEWES, this project will develop a Web-based search interface to all the hetergeneous database systems that are currently in service at CEWES, with or without a WWW interface. We expect result of this project can serve as a base model to build future similar Web-based domain-specific information systems to support other particular HPCM/PET application areas and programs, such as the Web-based remote learning in PET, asynchronous collaborative environment for HPC research to MSRC users, virtual classroom/university environment for self-learning/training to HBCU/MIs students.

Deliverables

This project will consist of the following sub-projects:

1. A single uniform Web interface for CEWES users to locate relevant resources in their daily work. It provides stardard key-word or context search capability to find location and/or content of particular information and resource of interests that are available within CEWES. Examples of such information resource may include (to be decided):
   • On-line Research Library and Service
   • Domain-specific databases such as GIS, CFD, CAD etc.
   • HTML documents on all Wes WWW servers
   • Other relevant Internet resources important to DOD users

2. A domain-specific Internet search engine for Internet Web search that are only relevant to Wes/DoD researchers. This is accomplished by developing an intelligent Web Robot that automatically discovers, retrieves, filters and indexes predefined domain-specific WWW pages from Internet into a text database and search engine. Techniques to automatically define/identify domain-specific Web documents of need to be studied.

3. A security model for access control and user profile using RDBMS system. A Web-based registration and user management system will be developed. This management system enables user/group privileges, information protection, customized services, user profile and search tracing and logging.

4. A WWW information management system. When a web site becomes too big and self-growing, it soon becomes difficult and impossible to manually manage and keep track on the most updated status of the overall and detailed WWW document space. By developing a RDBMS-based Web agent that will regularly traverse the Web site, we can build a WWW information management system that will help to locate and identify the summary and detailed info about a Web site, such as:
   • total size (in number of pages or bytes in space)
   • documents that are last updated in the past X days/weeks/months
   • documents that no longer exist but still have links embedded in other documents

Expected Staffing

Estimated Budget