PhD Thesis Papiani（博士论文Papiani）.doc

UNiversIty of Southampton An Architecture for Management of Large, Distributed, Scientific Data Volume 1 of 1 Mark Papiani Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science This thesis was submitted in May 2000. University of Southampton ABSTRACT Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science Electronics and Computer Science Doctor of Philosophy An Architecture for Management of Large, Distributed, Scientific Data Mark Papiani This thesis describes research into Web-based management of non-traditional data. Three prototype systems are discussed, GBIS, DBbrowse and EASIA, each of which provided examples of new ideas in this area. In 1994/1995, when most Web pages consisted of static HTML files, GBIS (the Graphical Benchmark Information Service) [181] [117] demonstrated the benefits of interactive, dynamic Web pages for visualisation of scientific data. GBIS also highlighted problems with storing the underlying data in a filesystem, which initiated an investigation into the use of databases as the underlying source for dynamic Web pages. In 1996/1997 this research investigated automatic generation of generic Web interfaces to databases to facilitate rapid deployment of interactive Web-based applications by developers with little Web development experience. A prototype system, DBbrowse, demonstrates the results [180] [75]. DBbrowse can generate Web interfaces to object-relational databases with intuitive query capabilities. DBbrowse also demonstrates a method for browsing databases to further support users with little database experience. In 1999 concepts from GBIS and DBbrowse were used as the starting point for examining new architectures for archiving scientific datasets. Data from numerical simulations generated by the UK Turbulence Consortium was used as a case study. Due to the large datasets produced, new Web-based mechanisms were required for storage, searching, retrieval and manipulation of simulati