Geographic information systems and digital libraries: Issues of size and scalability

Buttenfield, Barbara P.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/403 Copy

Description

Title

Geographic information systems and digital libraries: Issues of size and scalability

Author(s)

Buttenfield, Barbara P.

Issue Date

1996

Keyword(s)

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• Digital libraries

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."

Publisher

Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Series/Report Name or Number

Geographic information systems and libraries: patrons, maps, and spatial information [papers presented at the 1995 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, April 10-12, 1995]

ISSN

0069-4789

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/403

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