Noonan's data archives

[Peter Rauch]

Gary Noonan comments on some of the issues related to archiving and
retrieving research data sets. Here's an announcement about a seminar
I'll attend at UCB this Friday.  (It's actually a picturetel session
transmitted from UCSD.)

If any more info (references to useful background material, etc) becomes
available, I'll post it.
Peter
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To: sequoia at postgres.Berkeley.EDU, sequoia-sem at postgres.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: December 4 Seminar
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 92 13:57:55 -0800
From: Jeff Dozier <dozier at crseo.ucsb.edu>
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    Time:   1:00 pm
 Speaker:   Zahid Ahmed, Visualization Group,
            San Diego Supercomputer Center

   Title:   DIL - A Tool for Data Exchange and Data Access Systems

Abstract:

Because of the enormous range of scientific data types and data
generating sources that have become available over the past few
years, scientific information processing systems require
efficient handling of data access and data exchange tasks.  A
Data Interpretation Language (DIL) can be used to specify the
structural description of a data object, and would enable a
scientific information processing system to interpret the syntax
as well as semantics of data.  This talk will introduce the ideas
of the DIL in the context of present data exchange systems, and
in relation to the data access requirements of a visualization
system (AVS) interfaced with a database management system
(Postgres).  A brief survey of previous and on-going efforts in
data-exchange systems such as netCDF, CDL, HDF/HDF VSet, NASA
CCSDC's PVL and SFDU, IBM's DX, and data specification for AVS
field types will be presented.  Our approach of encoding
syntactic and semantic information within metadata objects will
introduced, followed by a discussion of how and why we can use a
DIL tool to specify evolving database schemas and support complex
data access events and new data vocabularies and scientific
terminologies.