Computations

The current environment is exemplified by isolated research groups that specialize in home-brewed software. The move to new, more fruitful collaborations marked by shared resources, we will take advantage of the emerging web-based object technology to create an environment where computing platforms, software, data and researchers will easily communicate. A standard computational framework, consisting of a web-server brokerage system and web-browser based development, data-flow and visualization tools will be agreed to and its components acquired by the collaborating institutions. Because this is a rapidly evolving field, we defer the choice of tools to the initial phase of the work, and expect it to evolve as the collaboration procedes. Promising technologies are described in ``Building Distributed Systems for the Pragmatic Object Web'' (Fox et al., http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/shrideep/book/), and prototypical systems have been investigated at JPL and NPAC.