The Sequoia 2000 Electronic Repository

These information sources include remote sensing data and images from satellites and aircraft, databases of measurements (e.g., temperature, wind speed, salinity, and snow depth) from specific geographic locations, complex vector information such as topographic maps, and large amounts of text from a variety of sources. These textual documents range from environmental impact reports on various regions to journal articles and technical reports documenting research results. The Sequoia 2000 project brought together computer and information scientists from the University of California (UC), Digital Equipment Corporation, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and global change researchers from UC campuses to develop practical solutions to some of these problems. One goal of this collaboration was the development of a large-scale (i.e., multiterabyte) storage system that would be available to the researchers over high-speed network links. In addition to storing massive amounts of data in this system, global change researchers needed to be able to share its contents, to search for specific known items in it, and to retrieve relevant unknown items based on various criteria. This sharing, searching, and retrieving had to be done efficiently and effectively, even when the scale of the database reached the multiterabyte range. The goal of the Electronic Repository portion of the Sequoia 2000 project was to design and evaluate methods to meet these needs for sharing, searching, and retrieving database objects (primarily text documents). The Sequoia 2000 Electronic Repository is the precursor of several ongoing projects at the University of California, Berkeley, that address the development of digital libraries. For repository objects to be effectively shared and retrieved, they must be indexed by content. User interfaces must allow researchers to both search for items based on specific characteristics and browse the repository for desired information. This paper summarizes The Sequoia 2000 Electronic Repository Ray R. Larson Christian Plaunt Allison G. Woodruff Marti A. Hearst