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IRSA has focussed its efforts in three specific areas:
- DBMS technology, in particular extending and augmenting commercial RDBMS functionality with astronomy-specific functionality. Examples of this are spatial indexing and the generation of positional cross-reference objects between datasets.
- Distributed information systems tools; in particular remote data access, data transfer, and visual interaction.
- Specific applications in support of IPAC projects and the needs of the astronomical research community. These applications tend to be fairly light-weight, in the sense that they require a relatively small amount of coding (most of the work being done by the above tools).
The work described here has been supported primarily by the NASA Interactive Analysis Environments (IAE) Program and focusses on the middle area of system architecture, in particular the design of tools and their interaction. The component list documentation describes the set of services we believe is basic to building a wide range of specific archive analysis applications. In this section we will focus on the rules by which those services are constructed.
This specific project (and in future most of our system) is written in pure JAVA, using RMI objects for all of the distributed system-level infrastructure and some of the data communication. Consequently, we will not discuss here such aspects as security and communications and refer the reader to any one of a number of books and Web sites on the topic. |
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